Just before we get into today’s topic on America’s attempt to steal a Soviet spacecraft, wanted to shout out the author of this script, Gilles Messier, also made a phenomenal shirt related to this topic. For those interested, you can check it out here. Now let’s get into it.

On October 4, 1957 at 7:28 PM Greenwich Mean Time, a massive R7 Semyorka rocket roared off the launch pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and soared into the night sky. The following morning, the world awoke to the stunning news: the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, into earth orbit. In Washington, DC, American politicians and military officials flew into a panic. Not only had the supposedly backwards Soviets achieved spaceflight years ahead of Western predictions, but the same R7 rocket which had placed Sputnik in orbit could also place a nuclear warhead anywhere in the Continental United States with less than 30 minutes’ warning. Worse still, unlike a manned strategic bomber, such intercontinental ballistic missiles could not be intercepted or shot down. Overnight, outer space became a new battlefield in the escalating Cold War. As the American government and aerospace industry geared up to compete in this newly-declared Space Race, intelligence agencies like the CIA sought to learn all they could about Soviet space technology. This proved a daunting task, for the closed nature of Soviet society made it all but impossible to infiltrate using human agents. As a result, analysts were forced to glean what little they could from grainy spy plane and satellite photographs and intercepted telemetry signals. But then, in late 1959, an unlikely opportunity suddenly presented itself: a chance to “kidnap” and examine a genuine Soviet space probe. This is the audacious story of the Great Lunik Heist.

As covered in our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite, early American efforts to respond to Sputnik 1 were less than successful, with the first attempted launch of an American satellite, Vanguard TV-3, embarrassingly blowing up on the launch pad on live television. This allowed the Soviets to steal a march with an impressive string of space firsts. On November 3, 1957, just one month after Sputnik 1, the Soviets launched the first living creature – a dog named Laika – into earth orbit aboard Sputnik 2. This was followed on May 15, 1958 by Sputnik 3, a more sophisticated satellite loaded with scientific instruments for measuring micrometeorites, cosmic rays, and other space phenomena. Significantly, the onboard tape recorder designed to collect and transmit data to earth failed during the flight, preventing Sputnik 3 from discovering the Van Allen Radiation Belts circling the earth. That discovery was instead made by the first American satellite, Explorer 1, launched on February 1st of that year.

In 1959, the Soviets achieved an even more spectacular cosmic hat trick with the Luna series of probes, the first spacecraft to visit another celestial body. The first of these was Luna 1, launched on January 2. Designed to impact the lunar surface, the small 361 kilogram or 797 pound spherical craft was powered by mercury-oxide batteries and was fitted with a radio tracking and telemetry transmitter and various instruments including magnetometers, micrometeorite detectors, Geiger counters, scintillation counters, and ion traps to study the local environment as it careened suicidally towards the lunar surface. Also carried aboard the probe and the carrier rocket were a pair of small hollow titanium “pennants” resembling soccer balls, each divided into 72 pentagonal sections engraved with the Soviet coat of arms, the letters CCCP, and the words SEPTEMBER 1959. These were fitted with a small explosive charges designed to shatter the sphere and scatter the sections over the lunar surface just before impact, effectively “planting the flag” on the moon. Unfortunately, a delayed signal from the ground-based control system resulted in the upper Blok E rocket stage burning for longer than expected, causing Luna 1 to miss the moon entirely and enter a heliocentric order. Though no longer transmitting, it remains in space to this day, orbiting between the earth and Mars.

Nine months later on September 12, the Soviets launched the nearly-identical Luna 2, which after a flight lasting 2 days, 14 hours, and 22 minutes, successfully impacted the lunar surface near the crater Archimedes, becoming the first manmade object to reach another celestial body. The mission was a major propaganda coup for the Soviets. At the time, the closest the American space program had come to the moon was around 60,000 kilometres or 37,000 miles with the Pioneer 4 probe, launched on March 3, 1959. It was widely believed that while the Soviets had more powerful rockets, American guidance systems were more sophisticated and accurate; however, Luna 2’s successful rendezvous with the lunar surface challenged this assumption. Indeed, so proud were the Soviets of this achievement that when Premier Nikita Khrushchev made his first and only state visit to the United States between September 15 and 27, 1959, he presented U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower with replicas of the titanium pennants carried aboard Luna 2.

But more impressive feats were still to come. On October 4, the second anniversary of Sputnik 1, the Soviets launched Luna 3 towards the moon. Two days later it became the first manmade object to enter a translunar trajectory. More sophisticated than any probe that had come before, Luna 3 featured solar panels to recharge its batteries; gas thrusters, solar sensors, and gyroscopes to maintain its orientation in space; and a complex yet ingenious system known as Yenisey-2 for taking and transmitting images back to earth. In this system, images were captured on regular photographic film, which was immediately developed in an onboard darkroom before being scanned by a television tube, encoded, and transmitted via radio. On October 7, as Luna 3 swung around the far side of the moon, the Yenisey-2 system captured 29 images of the lunar surface. The following day, as the probe swung back towards the earth, 17 of these images were successfully transmitted to earth, giving humanity its first-ever glimpses of this mysterious, hitherto unseen hemisphere. Amusingly, while the probe itself was Russian, the heat-and-radiation-proof photographic film it carried was American, having been recovered from a U.S. Air Force Genetrix spy balloon that crash-landed in the Soviet Union.

Before we continue with our story, it should be noted here that while the early Soviet space programme gave the impression of an unbroken string of successes, the reality was far different. Indeed, every successful mission was usually accompanied by several failures whose existence were kept top-secret for propaganda purposes. For example, the successful launch of Sputnik 3 on May 15, 1958 was preceded by a catastrophic rocket failure on April 27, while three attempts to launch a lunar probe on September 23, October 11, and December 4, 1958 ended in failure before the successful launch of Luna 1.

In any event, in late 1959 the Soviets, flush with victory, organized a touring international exhibition to show off the products of their great Communist economic system. Amid the usual displays of agricultural equipment and scale models of nuclear power plants were the crown jewels of the exhibition: full-scale models of Sputnik 1 and Luna 1, the latter encased in its upper rocket stage with glass-covered windows cut in its outer skin to show off the probe within. At least, everyone assumed they were models. But when some undercover CIA agents snuck into an exhibition after hours and examined the spacecraft closely, they became convinced that the Luna probe on display was, in fact, a genuine piece of space hardware. While the agents measured, sketched, and photographed every detail of the spacecraft’s interior, a more detailed examination in the exhibition hall was impossible. Immediately recognizing the opportunity to score a massive intelligence coup, the CIA thus hatched a daring plan to “kidnap” the Luna spacecraft.

It would not be easy. While on display the spacecraft was guarded round-the-clock by Soviet soldiers, while for transport between exhibition sites it was packed in a large wooden crate measuring 6 by 3.4 by 4.3 metres or 20 by 11 by 14 feet and shipped by rail and two sets of trucks. However, the operation was not entirely airtight; there were several weak points in the transport chain that the CIA could exploit. For example, while travelling by train the spacecraft was given no dedicated escort. And while Soviet agents were posted at the receiving train stations, communication with the exhibit organizers was poor and the agents were often unaware of what shipments to expect and when. They also did not inspect the crates’ contents when they arrived. These gaps in security allowed the CIA to pinpoint a few precious hours in which to secretly “borrow” the spacecraft – more commonly known in American circles by the pseudo-Russian moniker “Lunik.”

Sometime in late 1959 or early 1960 – the exact date remains classified – a crack team of four CIA agents from the Joint Factory Markings Centre left Langley, Virginia for Mexico City, where the Lunik had just finished being exhibited at the Auditorio Nacional. Under the cover of darkness, they stopped the truck carrying the spacecraft to the railway station, escorted the driver to a nearby hotel, and parked the truck in a nearby salvage yard, whose high walls concealed the agents from prying eyes. Meanwhile, CIA agents monitoring the railway station watched as the Soviet agents on duty returned home to their hotel rooms, apparently not realizing that a key piece of hardware had failed to arrive. The greatest heist in spaceflight history was on.

Back in the salvage yard, the agents set upon the massive crate with nail pullers, ropes, and crowbars. At first, the CIA worried that their forced entry would be easily spotted by the Soviets, but closer examination revealed the crate to be in rough condition from constant handling, allaying their fears. However, they soon discovered that the crate’s sides and ends were bolted together from the inside, leaving the top lid as the only viable access point. This meant that the spacecraft could not feasibly be removed from the crate for study; the agents would have to work inside the crate itself.

The agents thus pried off the lid and, wearing only socks on their feet so as not to scratch the spacecraft’s delicate skin, used rope ladders to climb down inside. There, they immediately encountered another unexpected obstacle: covering the single nut that secured the nosecone to the rocket stage was a small plastic seal bearing the Soviet coat of arms, which had to be broken in order to access the interior of the spacecraft. While this should have derailed the operation before it had even begun, thankfully the CIA had an ace up their sleeve: a local contact who could manufacture a replica seal overnight. This brief scare out of the way, the agents, armed with hammers, screwdrivers, cameras, flashlights, and – most importantly – metric wrenches, set about meticulously disassembling, measuring, and photographing every square inch – or rather, centimetre – of the Lunik.

This proved more challenging than anticipated, the awkward design of the rocket stage making it difficult to disassemble and inspect. For example, The rear bulkhead, the only means of accessing the engine compartment, was held in place by no fewer than 130 bolts! But working carefully and methodically the agents made steady progress. While much of the vital engine hardware and electronic equipment had been stripped from the vehicle, the agents were still able to photograph, measure, and weigh mounting brackets, propellant tanks, and other hardware to determine important parameters like propellant volumes, launch weights, and design stresses. This, in turn, would give clues as to the capabilities of Soviet launch vehicles. The agents also recorded the manufacturing marks on each component, allowing the manufacturing and supply chain of the Soviet space program to be better understood. Finally, several electrical connectors had been left in the stage; assuming that Soviet engineers and intelligence officers had intended to remove all electrical equipment, the CIA agents removed these components and brought them back to the United States for further analysis.

The agents worked from 7:30 PM to 4:00 AM the following morning, whereupon they set about carefully reassembling the spacecraft. This, too, proved more challenging than anticipated, as a 1967 CIA report reveals:

“The first job, re-securing the orb in its basket, proved to be the most ticklish and time consuming part of the whole night’s work. We spent almost an hour on this, one man in the cramped nose section trying to get the orb into precisely the right position and one in the engine compartment trying to engage the threads on the end of a rod he couldn’t see. After a number of futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made, and we all sighed with relief.”

Finally their work complete, the agents installed the replica seal, nailed the crate shut, and reunited the truck with its driver. At 7 AM, the CIA agents monitoring the railway station watched as the truck arrived and the Soviet agents returned from their hotel, supervised the transfer of the Lunik crate onto a waiting train, and left without a trace of suspicion. The plan had gone off without a hitch: for more than eight hours, the CIA had succeeded in “kidnapping” and examining a sensitive piece of high-tech space hardware right under the Soviets’ noses.

The Soviets never found out about the daring heist. Indeed, even within the CIA the incident remained largely obscure until 1967, when employee Sydney Finer wrote a sanitized account of the caper titled The Kidnapping of the Lunik for the agency journal Studies in Intelligence. Outside the agency, the operation remained completely unknown until 1996, when American space historian Dwayne Day stumbled upon it in a batch of recently-declassified CIA documents and published an account in the British Interplanetary Society magazine Spaceflight. However, full details of the plot, including Finer’s 1967 article, were not officially declassified until 2019.

While the exhibition version of the Lunik had been stripped of its most sensitive components, the CIA’s brief eight-hour examination still yielded a wealth of valuable intelligence. As Sydney Finer’s 1967 article concludes:

“The results of analysis…included probably identification of the producer of this Lunik stage, the fact that it was the fifth one produced, identification of three electrical producers who supplied components, and revelation of the system for numbering parts that was used here and conceivably for other Soviet space hardware.”

By assessing the current state of the art of Soviet rocket technology, the United States was able to determine what the Soviet space program could and could not achieve without dramatic improvements in capability. This, in turn, allowed the U.S. space program to more effectively set its own goals and timelines and ultimately overtake the Soviets in the Space Race. The Lunik plot also dramatically showcased the CIA’s flexibility, ingenuity, and intelligence-gathering capabilities:

“But perhaps more important in the long term than these positive intelligence results was the experience and example of fine cooperation on a job between covert operators and essentially overt collectors.”

The Soviet Luna project carried on for another decade and a half, with fifteen missions being successfully flown between 1959 and 1976. Several of these missions achieved important spaceflight firsts. For example, on February 3, 1966, Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon and return images of its surface. Two months later on April 3, Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the moon. On September 24, 1970, Luna 16 touched down on the lunar surface, collected soil samples, and returned them successfully to the earth, while on November 17 of that year Luna 17 successfully deployed Lunokhod 1, history’s first robotic planetary rover. By this time, however, the United States had already landed three manned missions on the moon – Apollo 11, 12, and 14 – completely eclipsing the Soviet achievements. Indeed, in a forgotten and rather pathetic incident, on July 21, 1969, mere hours before Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ended their historic mission, the unmanned Luna 15 probe lost control and crashed into the lunar surface. Whoopsie-doodle!

Despite the Soviets’ early successes, soon a number of factors including a flagging economy, a string of failed launches, and the untimely death of chief designer Sergei Korolev allowed the U.S. space program to pull ahead, and by the late 1960s it became clear that the Americans had won the Space Race. In the early 1970s the Soviets cancelled their own manned lunar program and switched their focus to long-duration orbital spaceflight and the construction of permanent manned space stations, starting with Salyut 1 in 1971.

While today the U.S victory in the Space Race appears like a foregone conclusion, at the time this was far from the case – hence why the CIA was so keen to learn anything it could about Luna 1 and other Soviet Space hardware. Indeed, along with Operation Ivy Bells, a 1971 U.S. Navy caper covered in our previous video Silent Seas: the Top Secret, Greatest Cold War Naval Espionage Mission; and Project Azorian, an absolutely bonkers 1974 attempt to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the 1959 Lunik heist epitomizes the lengths U.S. Intelligence was willing to go to gain the upper hand in the 50-year global undeclared conflict known as the Cold War.
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On the morning of July 27, 1943, U.S. Army Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Duckworth sat down to breakfast at Bryan Field near Galveston, Texas. Outside the wind howled as a category 2 hurricane bore down upon the coast. The storm had come as a complete surprise; as a precaution against U-boat attacks a radio blackout had been ordered for all ships in the Gulf of Mexico, preventing early warnings from reaching the shore. Colonel Duckworth’s breakfast companions were a group of visiting British pilots being trained to fly on instruments, who, upon learning of the approaching hurricane, bet Duckworth that his North American T-6 Texan, the standard American single-engine training aircraft, was too flimsy to fly through the eye of the storm. The wager was laughably small: a single highball cocktail. To their surprise Duckworth accepted, and what happened next would change the history of aviation and meteorology forever.

Born in Savannah, Georgia on September 8, 1902, Joseph B. Duckworth had aviation in his blood. After graduating as a U.S. Army Air Force Cadet in 1928, through the 1930s Duckworth served as an airline pilot for the Ford Motor Company, Curtiss-Wright Flying Service, and Eastern Airlines, accumulating over 12,000 flying hours and becoming intimately familiar with the art and science of instrument flying. Up until the early 1920s, most pilots only flew ‘contact’ – that is, in conditions that allowed them to maintain sight of the ground. But with the introduction of the U.S. Air Mail Service in 1918, the need to maintain delivery schedules spurred the development of Instrument Flight Rules or IFR, used for when pilots fly in zero visibility conditions such as at night or in bad weather.

In 1940, Duckworth was recalled to the Army Air Force as a Major and in 1942 was placed in charge of the instrument flying program at Bryan Field in Texas. What he found there shocked him. While airlines had made massive progress in the science of instrument flying, the Air Force was still languishing in the 1910s. He states,

“The first shock I received was the almost total ignorance of instrument flying throughout the Air Corps. Cadets were being given flight training as if there were no instruments and then directed to fly an aircraft across the Atlantic at night. Losses in combat were less than those sustained from ignorance of instrument flying alone.”

Indeed, while most training aircraft were equipped with the necessary instruments for blind-flying, such as gyrocompasses and artificial horizons, instructors told their pupils that “those were for airline pilots” and bizarrely instructed them to keep them locked to prevent damage to the delicate equipment. Wartime demand for aircrew had also led to training being dangerously truncated from one year in 1940 to six months in 1942, with the number of flying hours required to fly a multi-engined bomber in combat dropping from 1000 to only 3. So disgusted was Duckworth by this state of affairs that he later stated he wanted to:

“…cut [the Cadets’] prized silver wings in half and tell [them] that the other half would be given them if they survived six months.”

Duckworth’s first order of business was to evaluate the instructors, most of whom he found to be grossly under-qualified. He thus established the first Air Force Standardization Board to train and evaluate flight instructors. He also developed a completely new training program and manual to instruct pilots in instrument flying. And it worked: between May and October of 1942 the number of students at Bryan Field nearly doubled, but the accident rate fell by more than half. Thanks to this success, in November, Duckworth’s system was implemented across the entire Southeast Training Command, and his manuals would be used by the Air Force for decades to come. For this reason, Joe Duckworth is widely regarded in the Air Force as the father of instrument flying. Thus, when those British pilots made their bet with him about flying in a hurricane on that July morning in 1943, there were few men more qualified to take them up on it. But why would he want to?

Aerial weather tracking was nothing new in 1943. In August of 1935 a United States Weather Bureau station in Jacksonville, Florida detected a hurricane developing east of the Bahamas, which they determined would make landfall on the north coast of Cuba. But when the storm failed to arrive, on September 2, Captain Leonard K. Povey of the Cuban Army Air Corps took off in his Curtiss Hawk II biplane and soon spotted the hurricane heading north towards the Florida Keys. The Labour Day Hurricane of 1935 proved so destructive that Povey would recommend the establishment of a regular aerial hurricane patrol to avoid future tragedies. But until Duckworth’s flight in 1943, nobody had actually flown into a hurricane.

Knowing that official approval to do so would take hours to obtain – if at all – Duckworth headed straight to the airfield and enlisted the services of the only navigator on duty that morning, Lieutenant Ralph O’Hair. Such was O’Hair’s faith in Duckworth as a pilot that within minutes the pair were off the ground and flying south towards the Gulf of Mexico. As they passed over Galveston, air traffic control asked if they were aware a hurricane was approaching. When Duckworth nonchalantly answered “yes”, the tower simply asked where to send the search party if their aircraft disappeared. Minutes later, Duckworth and O’Hair plunged headlong into the storm.

O’Hair later described the flight as like “Being tossed about like a stick in a dog’s mouth.” But despite the British pilots’ dire predictions, the T-6 made it through in one piece and soon emerged into the calm eye of the hurricane. Duckworth lingered long enough to take some notes on the shape of the eyewall before turning around and plunging back into the howling 130mph winds. When he and O’Hair landed back and Bryan Field, waiting on the tarmac was weather officer Lieutenant William Jones-Burdick, who asked to be flown into the hurricane so he could take some measurements. And so it was that Duckworth took off once again and performed the historic feat a second time in one day.

Duckworth would later downplay the heroism of his accomplishment, explaining that airline pilots at the time regularly flew in high altitude Jet Stream winds of up to 150mph. But he would admit, with typical understatement that surely his British compatriots probably appreciated, that:

“The only embarrassing episode would have been engine failure, which, with the strong ground winds, would probably have prevented a landing, and certainly would have made descent via parachute highly inconvenient.”

While his superiors were alarmed by his unauthorized flight, there is no record of Duckworth being reprimanded for it. Nor is there any record of him receiving his promised cocktail, though his breakfast companions’ next meal undoubtedly contained some variety of crow.

At the end of the war, Joe Duckworth was promoted to Colonel and served as commander of Hickham Field in Hawaii, retiring from the Air Force in 1955. Over the next 9 years he taught physics at Albion College in Michigan, served as head of the Safety Bureau for the Civil Aeronautics Board, and became a consultant for the Aircraft Owners’ and Pilots Association before passing away at Battle Creek Community Hospital on July 26, 1964 – almost 19 years to the day from his historic flight

But the legacy of that flight lives on. The hurricane of July 27, 1943 killed 19 people and caused over $17 million in damage (or about $300 million today), prompting local authorities to abandon radio blackouts and the Air Force to establish the first dedicated aerial weather unit, the 3rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron or the Hurricane Hunters. Flying B-25 Mitchell medium bombers from Presque Isle, Maine and Gander, Newfoundland, the 3rd WRS was tasked with locating and tracking storms along the entire eastern seaboard, especially around the strategically vital Atlantic shipping lanes. The unit later received more sophisticated RB-29 Superfortress aircraft, with which it achieved the first medium-level penetration of Hurricane Love on October 19, 1947.

Deactivated later that year, the unit was reborn in 1951 as the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, which still operates to this day. Based at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, the 53rd operates a flight of 10 WC-130J Super Hercules transports, specially modified with a suite of sophisticated meteorological instruments. While nominally an Air Force Unit, the 53rd ultimately receives its orders from the U.S. Department of Commerce, forming part of a national strategy to minimize loss of life and property due to extreme weather events. As part of the National Hurricane Operations Plan, the 53rd maintains the ability to intercept up to 3 storms per day with a response time of 16 hours, its area of operations stretching from the Mid-Atlantic to the International Date Line in the Pacific. Crews can fly a variety of mission profiles, from simple low-level investigations to locate developing hurricanes to dropping weather buoys ahead of storms to missions where the aircraft remains in the eye of the hurricane for as long as possible, allowing the storm to be tracked with pinpoint accuracy. While satellite imagery has made tracking hurricanes much easier in recent years, certain data like barometric pressure or interior windspeed can only be measured directly using aircraft, meaning that units like the 53rd will continue to play a vital role in the United States’ hurricane management efforts for the foreseeable future.

Similar to, but distinct from the 53rd are the Hurricane Hunters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA based at Lakeland Linder International Airport in Florida. While the 53rd is primarily tasked with tracking and measuring storms as an emergency response, the NOAA Hurricane Hunters primarily conduct long-term scientific research. However, the Air Force maintains the post of Chief, Aerial Reconnaissance Coordination, All Hurricanes, or CARCAH, whose primary job we can only assume is trying to explain that title when not coordinating the activities of the two units in an emergency if required.

In line with its pioneering mission, over the years the 53rd has achieved a number of notable firsts. In 1973, Sergeant Vickiann Esposito, a weather buoy operator, became the first woman in Air Force history to qualify as aircrew, while in 1977 1st Lieutenant Florence Fowler became the first woman to be rated as a navigator.

As for the danger of flying into the world’s most powerful storms, like Colonel Duckworth 80 years before, the men and women of the 53rd see it as just another part of the job. As Majors Kendall Dunn and Tobi Baker explain:

“We fly into weather when all other aircraft have to stay at least 20 miles out to avoid it. Flying into storms, this is our type of combat.”

“This opportunity is unique, because you can say you’re one in 20 in the world that does your job. You get to experience something that mother nature produces, that not many others get to see with their naked eye. There’s nothing like breaking through the eye-wall and have an open sky above you and being encompassed by a bowl of clouds around you that has so much destructive power.”

And to think it all started with a simple wager over breakfast.

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Ahhh the microwave oven: perhaps the most con of mod cons. Whether you’re zapping a mug of lukewarm coffee back to life, rewarming some leftovers, or heating up a frozen burrito for the fourth time this week, this handy little device will get the job done quickly and efficiently without the muss and fuss of a regular stove or oven. But have you ever wondered how this seemingly magical box manages to cook your food without flames or heat – or who invented it in the first place and why? Well, the answer may surprise you, for the key working component in this appliance found in every kitchen, break room, and hotel suite was once the most closely-guarded military secret in the world, a key technological breakthrough that was instrumental in winning the Second World War and shaping the modern world as we know it. This is the long and surprisingly fascinating story of the microwave oven.

The origins of the microwave oven stretch all the way back to the discovery of radio waves. In 1865, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published the groundbreaking paper A Dynamical Theory of Electromagnetic Fields, in which he postulated that visible light is composed of interacting electric and magnetic fields and laid out the physical laws – today known as Maxwell’s Equations – governing the behaviour of these waves. Maxwell’s theories predicted the existence of an entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves, varying in frequency and wavelength. In 1888, German physicist Heinrich Hertz – whose name is now the official unit of frequency – succeeded in generating and detecting long, low-frequency electromagnetic waves, confirming Maxwell’s predictions. Hertz’s discoveries not only inspired later inventors like Guglielmo Marconi to develop wireless communications – aka radio – but also laid the groundwork for the discovery of the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. While the spectrum is continuous, for the sake of convenience it is usually divided into seven main regions or bands according to wavelength: radio waves down to 10 metres; microwaves, from 1 metre to 1 millimetre; infrared light, from 100 to 1 micrometers; visible light, from 700 to 400 nanometers; ultraviolet light, from 400 to 121 nanometers; X-rays, from 10 nanometers to 100 picometer; and finally gamma rays, 10 picometers and below.

In the 1910s and 20s, it was discovered that high-frequency electric currents and shortwave radio signals could induce heating in a variety of materials – including human tissue. This led to the development of diathermy, a method for electromagnetically heating muscles and other deep tissue still widely used in physiotherapy to this day. The application of this technology to the field of cooking was readily apparent, and at the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, electrical giant Westinghouse demonstrated the rapid cooking of foods like steak and potatoes by placing them between two metal plates attached to a 10 kilowatt, 60 megahertz shortwave radio transmitter. But while impressive, the required equipment was bulky, expensive, and dangerous, and the technique failed to take off. The dream of cooking food rapidly without flames would have to await the development of a revolutionary piece of technology, whose invention was driven by the needs not of medicine or gastronomy, but of war.

Our story properly begins in 1934, as Europe was once again gearing up for war. The inter-war period saw huge leaps in aviation technology, with aircraft going from rickety contraptions of wood, wire, and fabric to sleek, powerful, all-metal machines capable of flying at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per hour and altitudes of tens of thousands of metres. So advanced were these new weapons that military planners boasted that “the bomber will always get through” and that future wars would be ended swiftly and decisively by destroying the enemy’s military and industrial assets from the air. In the United Kingdom, these developments caused a not significant amount of anxiety, as the nation had already gotten a taste of the horrors of aerial bombardment during the first World War. Unfortunately, the Royal Air Force’s infrastructure for detecting and tracking incoming enemy bombers had barely evolved over the previous two decades, depending largely on the human aircraft spotters of the Royal Observer Corps.
Sound locating devices called acoustic mirrors were also installed at several RAF bases, but these were of dubious utility. While this equipment could give an incoming aircraft’s bearing, it could not measure its range, while the faint sound of distant aircraft was easily drowned out by other noises. Furthermore, as sound travels at slightly over 1,200 kilometres per hour and even bombers of the era could reach over 400 kilometres per hour, an aircraft’s position would have changed significantly by the time it was detected.

This forced the Royal Air Force to adopt the strategy of Standing Patrols, whereby fighters continuously circled likely approach routes to major targets, being relieved by other aircraft when their fuel ran out. As can be imagined, this was a very inefficient strategy, extremely costly in terms of aircraft, engine hours, and fuel, so in the late 1930s the RAF introduced specialized interceptor aircraft like the Hawker Fury and Hawker Hurricane which could remain on the ground and, upon receiving an attack warning, quickly take off and climb to operating altitude. However, there could never be enough of these aircraft to cover the entirety of the UK; some means of detecting incoming aircraft was still needed in order to vector the interceptors onto their targets.

Thankfully, a solution soon appeared in the form of Radio Detection or RD – what today is widely known as Radar. While the invention of radar is typically credited to the British, like all big, important ideas it was actually developed independently in several different countries at around the same time. During his 1888 experiments with radio waves, Heinrich Hertz discovered that these waves could be reflected off metallic objects. Similar effects were later observed by radio pioneers such as Marconi and British engineer Charles Samuel Franklin, who in a 1922 paper delivered before the Institution of Electrical Engineers wrote:

“I also described tests carried out in transmitting a beam of reflected waves across country … and pointed out the possibility of the utility of such a system if applied to lighthouses and lightships, so as to enable vessels in foggy weather to locate dangerous points around the coasts … It [now] seems to me that it should be possible to design [an] apparatus by means of which a ship could radiate or project a divergent beam of these rays in any desired direction, which rays, if coming across a metallic object, such as another steamer or ship, would be reflected back to a receiver screened from the local transmitter on the sending ship, and thereby immediately reveal the presence and bearing of the other ship in fog or thick weather.”

Indeed, such a device had already been patented in 1904 by German engineer Christian Hülsmeyer under the name Obstacle Detector and Ship Navigation Device. Based on contemporary radio technology, the device used a simple high voltage spark gap and a coherer receiver to project a burst of radio waves and listen for the echo, allowing ships, icebergs, and other hazards to be detected at night or in dense fog at ranges up to 3 kilometres. It could also measure the approximate range of a contact by triangulating the strength of the echoes from various angles. But while now widely recognized as the first practical radar set, unfortunately Hülsmeyer’s invention failed to attract any military or commercial interest.

But in 1933, physicist Rudolf Kühnhold, scientific director of the Kriegsmarine or German navy, began experimenting with radio devices for detecting and tracking ships at sea. After some initial failed experiments, he joined forces with amateur radio operators Paul-Günther Erbslöh and Hans-Karl Freiherr von Willisen and formed a private company called GEMA. In June 1934, the company built a 70-watt transmitter and receiver operating at a frequency of 600 megahertz and wavelength of 50 centimetres and succeeded in detecting large ships in Kiel harbour at a distance of 2 kilometres. Unlike Christian Hülsmeyer’s device, the range of contacts was determined by pulsing the radio beam and measuring the time it took for each pulse to travel back and forth. The echoes were also displayed visually on a Braun cathode-ray tube. In September 1935, GEMA successfully demonstrated their equipment to the Kriegsmarine, who immediately ordered it into production as the Seetakt, the world’s first operational ship-borne radar. The technology was also later adapted into the Freya early warning radar to defend German territory against enemy bombers. But while the Germans initially led the world in radar technology, development work was ordered halted shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. This was because German leaders assumed the war would be over in a matter of months; therefore, advanced technologies like radar and jet propulsion would not be needed.

Meanwhile in Britain, the development of radar was spurred by the most unlikely of circumstances. In 1934, articles appeared in German newspapers claiming that the German military was developing a “death ray” that used powerful radio beams to shoot down enemy aircraft. Intrigued – and apparently desperate for any military advantage, however far-fetched – Dr. Harry E. Wimperis, the Air Ministry Director of Scientific Research, contacted Dr. Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratory’s Radio Research Station in Slough and asked him if such a death ray was feasible. Watson-Watt passed on the task to his colleague Arnold Wilkins, who later recalled:

“I received the request on a piece of torn off calendar. Watson Watt liked using that sort of thing being an economical Scotsman. The request, I soon deduced, was to assess the feasibility of a Death Ray, as he was asking me to calculate the amount of radio energy which must be radiated to raise the temperature of a man’s blood to fever heat at a certain distance.”

To the disappointment of science fiction fans everywhere, it took Wilkins less than half an hour to calculate that the power requirements of a working death ray were far too high to be practical. However, in his report he asked if there was anything else the Radio Research Station could do to help the Air Ministry. He soon remembered reading a Post Office report from the previous year claiming that an aircraft flying across an experimental VHF radio telephone link had caused the received signal to fade, and wondered whether such a radio beam could be used to detect and track aircraft at long distances. Discussing the matter with Watson-Watt, Wilkins realized that if they used a radio beam with a wavelength of 50 metres, the 25-metre metal tubing wings of the Handley Page Heyford – the RAF’s standard bomber at the time – would act as a half-wave dipole antenna, reflecting back a much stronger signal than previously assumed. Intrigued by this possibility, the Air Ministry Defence Committee commissioned Watson-Watt to prepare a scientific report on radio detection or RD, which he submitted on February 12, 1935 under the title Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Methods. In this remarkable paper, Watson-Watt not only laid out the fundamentals of radar, but predicted other technologies such as radio-based Identification Friend or Foe or IFF systems for aircraft. Impressed, the Air Ministry requested a live demonstration of his theories, scheduled for February 16.

In classic British make-do-and-mend fashion, Watson-Watt was forced to beg, borrow, and steal much of the equipment needed for this demonstration. For the transmitter he used the BBC’s shortwave radio station at Daventry, transmitting at a frequency of 6 Megahertz and a wavelength of 49 metres; and for the receiver he borrowed equipment built by the Radio Research Station’s Sir Edward Appleton to study the earth’s ionosphere and packed it into an ancient Morris Commercial van. He and Wilkins drove the van to a field outside the town of Weedon, near Daventry, where they set up their receiving aerials. The following day, witnessed by Air Ministry observer A.P. Rowe, the pair hunched over a glowing cathode ray tube display in the cramped van while RAF pilot Flight Lieutenant F.L. Blucke took off and flew his Heyford bomber at 3,000 metres on a predetermined course between Daventry and Weedon. As the bomber lumbered past at 144 kilometres per hour, the team watched as the glowing green dot slowly climbed up the tube, the signal only being lost when the aircraft was 13 kilometres away. According to legend, Watson-Watt triumphantly declared: “Britain is once more an island!”

With the basic principle of Radio Detection proven, Watson-Watt received £10,000 from the Air Ministry – an enormous sum in those days – to further develop the technology. In May 1935, he and his colleagues set up an experimental establishment on an island at Ordfordness in Suffolk, officially named the Ionospheric Research Station to conceal its true purpose. Progress was incredibly swift; after only a month the team succeeded in tracking a Westland Wallace aircraft out to a range of 27 kilometres, while just a week later they accidentally detected a flight of three RAF Hawker Hart fighters at a range of 32 kilometres and discovered they could track each aircraft individually. The team soon established the optimal wavelength for long-distance detection – 10 metres – and a convenient method for displaying the returned echoes. The cathode ray tube displays were fitted with a time base circuit that made a phosphorescent dot oscillate rapidly across the screen, forming a horizontal line. Echoes returned from aircraft would deflect the dot upwards, creating peaks along the line. The closer the contact, the further left along the line the peak formed, allowing the aircraft’s range to be determined. Altitude was measured by comparing the return of signals to two horizontal antennas mounted one above the other, while bearing was measured by comparing returns to two crossed aerials. This allowed the position of an incoming aircraft to be determined in three dimensions with a high level of accuracy at up to 200 kilometres. However, at the original signal pulse rate of 25 per second it could not detect aircraft at ranges under 30 kilometres; to solve this, the rate was increased to tens of millions of pulses per second. At this point the technology was still known simply as Radio Detection, but American researchers later gave it the name Radio Direction-finding And Ranging – or RADAR for short.

With all the technical details worked out, in early 1936 Watson-Watt’s team began constructing the first operational radar station at Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, the transmitting and receiving aerials being mounted on 100-metre-tall steel and wooden towers. Initially used for technical development and training of future radar crews, in May 1937 the Bawdsey Manor installation became the first site of the Chain Home or CH radar network designed to defend England’s southern and eastern coastlines. By the time it became fully operational in the spring of 1939, Chain Home totalled 20 radar sites stretching from the Isle of Wight to the Firth of Forth. To detect low-flying aircraft, a second parallel network called Chain Home Low based on gun-laying radar sets operating at a wavelength of 1.5 metres was also installed. Along with the Royal Observer Corps, Chain Home formed the early warning component of the so-called Dowding System, named after Air Chief Marshal High Dowding, commander of RAF Fighter Command. The coordinates and heading of enemy bomber formations were transmitted from Chain Home and ROC stations to a filter room at Fighter Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory in London, where ground controllers – many of them members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or WAAFs – plotted this information on a giant map and guided the appropriate fighter units to make the interception. By providing early warning and directing aircraft to specific targets, the Dowding System allowed Britain’s limited fighter force to be deployed with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

Compared to contemporary German and later wartime designs, Chain Home was relatively primitive and inefficient; instead of mechanically scanning a narrow beam, it projected a giant “floodlight” across the entire sky – a system which consumed huge amounts of power. Despite this, however, the network used readily-available technology, allowing it to be made operational just in time for the outbreak of the Second World War – a fact which would soon grant the British an enormous strategic advantage.

Meanwhile, the Germans watched with curiosity as the Chain Home towers began popping up along the English coast. While they assumed they had something to do with aerial defence, the stations looked so different from German designs that they could not be certain. So, in the spring of 1939, General Wolfgang Martini, head of the Luftwaffe signals branch, ordered the mysterious towers investigated. For this mission, he commandeered an unusual vehicle: the LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin, the last German rigid airship and the sister ship of the ill-fated Hindenburg. Fitted with signals intelligence equipment, Graf Zeppelin left its hangar in Frankfurt on July 12, 1939 and headed for Bawdsey on the English coast, cruising just out of sight of the experimental station. Yet instead of the pulsed radar signals they were expecting, the German radio operators just heard random static. No matter how they adjusted their equipment, they could detect nothing. After cruising up and down the English coast for several hours, the airship gave up and returned home empty-handed. She returned early the next month on another spy mission but was equally unsuccessful, leading the Germans to conclude that the British had no working early-warning system. Of course, Chain Home was, in fact, fully operational, and its operators accurately tracked the giant airship throughout its two spy flights. So why didn’t Graf Zeppelin detect their signals? The simple fact was that German radars worked at wavelengths of around 50 centimetres, and they expected the British equipment to be similar. But Chain Home worked on a much longer 10 metre wavelength; the Germans simply hadn’t set their detection equipment to the right frequencies.

This oversight was to have dire consequences in the summer of 1940 when the Luftwaffe set out to destroy the Royal Air Force on the ground and force the British to negotiate peace terms – an aerial struggle now known as the Battle of Britain. Though early in the battle the Germans made some dive-bombing raids against the Chain Home radar stations, this campaign was half-hearted and quickly abandoned. Not only did the Germans fail to recognize the vital importance of the stations, but the installations themselves proved difficult to attack and any damage inflicted was quickly repaired. This failure was to cost the Germans dearly for, aided by Chain Home and the Dowding System, within two months RAF Fighter Command succeeded in chasing the Luftwaffe out of the daylight skies, shooting down 1736 German bombers and fighters at a loss of just 915 British aircraft. The Germans thus switched to making nighttime raids against civilian centres like London, Liverpool, and Coventry, kicking off the infamous Blitz.

Developed just in the nick of time, the Chain Home radars played a vital role in saving the Royal Air Force from destruction and allowing Britain to survive to fight another day. But as the first phase of the Battle of Britain drew to a close, the system began to show its major shortcomings. While Chain Home and the Dowding System could track incoming enemy aircraft and vector fighters onto an interception course, the actual interceptions had to be made visually. However, when the Germans switched to night bombing this became all but impossible, and for the first few months of the Blitz Britain’s air defences proved all but useless against the nocturnal intruders. Solving this problem would lead to one of the greatest technological breakthroughs of the entire war.

Meanwhile, the RAF’s bomber command turned the tables on the Germans and began flying regular bombing raids on Germany and occupied Europe. But just like the Germans, the British quickly discovered that bombing in daylight was suicide, and atrocious losses at the hands of Luftwaffe fighters forced them to switch to night bombing. However, this created problems of its own, as navigating to a target and dropping bombs accurately in pitch-darkness proved all but impossible. Indeed, in the early days of the bombing campaign, it was determined that over 90% of bombs fell on open countryside several kilometres from the intended target. Even worse, by this time the Germans had recognized the utility of radar and developed their own, even more sophisticated version of the Dowding System known as Himmelbett or “four-poster bed” or the Kammhuber Line after Generalmajor Josef Kammhuber, commander of Luftwaffe night fighters. Early warning of incoming enemy bombers was given by a chain of coastal radars codenamed Freya – named after the queen of the Gods in Germanic mythology – operating at a wavelength of 1.2 metres. Once the bombers had passed the coast, they were then handed over to a network of smaller radars codenamed Würzburg operating at a wavelength of 50 centimetres which could accurately track individual bombers and direct searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and night fighters towards them. As in the Dowding system, all this was coordinated from central command rooms largely staffed by female auxiliaries known as Luftwaffe Helferin. At first, German night fighters, like their British counterparts, had to make the actual interceptions visually, but from 1942 onwards they were increasingly equipped with the 61 centimetre FuG 202 Lichtenstein airborne intercept radar, whose distinctive branching aerials mounted to the aircraft’s nose were nicknamed “mattress” or “stag’s horns.”

The technical details of the Kammhuber Line, which inflicted unsustainable losses in the early days of the night bombing campaign, were soon worked out by British Intelligence by various methods, including signals intelligence, aerial reconnaissance photographs, the breaking of the German Enigma cipher, and even a daring raid on February 27, 1942 codenamed Operation Biting, in which a team of British airborne troops parachuted into a Würzburg site in Bruneval, France to capture pieces of the radar and some of its operators – but that is a story for another video. Once the British knew how the system and its various components worked, they very quickly set about developing countermeasures. The first of these was simply to form the bomber force into a single concentrated stream and fly them through a single point in the Kammhuber Line, swamping the Würzburg radars and preventing night fighters from being accurately guided towards individual targets. However, the Germans quickly countered this tactic by deepening the line to include multiple overlapping defensive sectors and placing large radar-controlled antiaircraft batteries around major industrial targets like factories.

Undeterred, the British turned to a series of increasingly-sophisticated electronic countermeasures. The first of these, codenamed Tinsel, Jostle, and Airborne Cigar, jammed night fighters’ radios by broadcasting white noise generated by microphones placed in the attacking bombers’ engines, preventing ground controllers from guiding them to an intercept. Later, when night fighters began being equipped with Lichtenstein airborne radar, another jamming device, codenamed Piperack, was developed to counter it. Mandrel was used to jam the Freya early-warning radars, Moonshine was a transponder which made a single decoy aircraft appear on radar like an entire flight of bombers, luring German air defences away from the main force; while Perfectos triggered the night fighters’ Identification Friend or Foe or IFF transponders, revealing their positions. Rather more devious – and amusing – was Operation Corona, in which German-speaking radio operators aboard the bombers impersonated the German ground controllers, causing mass confusion among the night fighter force. After learning of this deception, the Germans switched to using female ground controllers, assuming that the RAF would not send WAAFs up in operational aircraft. But the British were already one step ahead, and had set up a team of German-speaking WAAFs at a high-powered transmitting station at Hollywood Manor in Kent. This scheme often resulted in darkly hilarious scenes, as one WAAF, Ruth Tosek, later recalled:

“…they would say, “Das ist eine feind Stimme – an enemy voice don’t listen to it! Don’t listen to it!” And we would reply, “Sir Sind die richtige Stimme – We are the real voice.” This would go on until the pilot became completely confused and didn’t know who was who.”

But the most effective Allied radar countermeasure was, ironically, the simplest. Codenamed Window, this consisted of strips of aluminium foil cut to half the wavelength of the German Würzburg radar – 26.5 centimetres – creating a half-wave dipole antenna that would radiate back a much stronger echo than a random aircraft structure. Dropped in bundles from attacking aircraft, Window completely overwhelmed the radars, rendering them useless. Indeed, so effective was Window that for months the British hesitated to deploy it, fearing that the Germans would quickly copy it and retaliate in kind. Ironically, the Germans had developed an identical weapon codenamed Düppel, but also hesitated to use it for identical reasons. However, RAF Bomber Command losses soon became so high that Prime Minister Winston Churchill ultimately gave the order to “open the window.” The first large-scale operational use of this “doomsday” weapon was during Operation Gomorrah, the July 24, 1943 firebombing raid against the port city of Hamburg. As expected, Window proved devastatingly effective, completely blinding the German defences and leaving searchlights, antiaircraft guns, and night fighters to grope uselessly around the night sky. This allowed the 746 bombers to reach the city almost unopposed and deliver their deadly payloads. The summer of 1943 had been unusually hot and dry, turning Hamburg into a tinderbox and allowing the incendiary bombs to touch off a gigantic firestorm – a self-sustaining flame tornado that generated winds up to 240 kilometres per hour, sweeping citizens off their feet like dried leaves and sucking the air out of air raid shelters. The raid destroyed 61% of Hamburg’s houses and killed 51,000 of its citizens for the loss of just 12 RAF aircraft. Indeed, afterwards Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, stated that if raids of similar size had been conducted against just five more major German cities, the Allies could have won the war in 1943.

With their radar network rendered ineffective, the Germans switched to a tactic codenamed Wilde Sau or “wild boar”, in which night fighters flew above the enemy bomber streams and made their interceptions visually by spotting their targets silhouetted against the searchlights and fires on the ground below. Later, they also developed systems called Wurzlaus and Nuremberg that could distinguish between moving bombers and stationary clouds of Window or detect the specific reflections produced by spinning aircraft propellers. Night fighters were also equipped with Lichtenstein SN2 and Neptune radars operating at frequencies immune to Window and the Flensburg and Naxos devices, which allowed the fighters to home in on Allied bombers’ Monica tail warning radars and H2S ground-scanning radars. These advancements allowed the Germans to resume inflicting heavy losses against Allied bombers starting in early 1944. As a result, the Allies were forced to remove Monica from their aircraft and only turn on their radars at the last possible moment.

But if the Germans ever considered retaliating against Britain using Düppel, they would have found this countermeasure wholly ineffective thanks to a key technological breakthrough: a device capable of producing extremely short-wave centrimetric radar beams. The development of this device was initiated by the Royal Navy, which wanted a more precise radar to allow warships and patrol aircraft to detect small targets like surfaced U-boats and aim their guns in poor visibility and at long distances. In 1939, the Admiralty contacted a team at the University of Birmingham under Dr. Marcus Oliphant, who would later play a key role in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Oliphant assigned the task of developing centimetric radar to research fellow John Randall and postgraduate student Harry Boot, who began experimenting with a device known as a Klystron. Used in many early radar sets, the klystron was a type of amplifying vacuum tube that bounced a beam of electrons between two resonant cavities, creating an oscillation that generated high-frequency radio waves. Unfortunately, klystrons could only generate practical radar beams at wavelengths down to 50 centimetres; at shorter wavelengths the power requirements became impractically high. Randall and Boot thus abandoned the klystron and focused on another device known as a split-anode magnetron. In November 1939, the pair sketched out an unusual device they dubbed the cavity magnetron. This consisted of a solid cylindrical anode made of copper with a central cavity and six smaller resonant cavities arranged around it and connected by slots. A cathode injected electrons into the central cavity while a powerful magnet caused the electron beam to swirl around its edge past the openings to the peripheral cavities, creating resonance in a similar manner to blowing air across the mouth of a bottle and – hopefully – generating wavelengths of 10 centimetres or less.

When Randall and Boot presented their concept to Oliphant he was not overly enthusiastic, but given the discouraging lack of success with other approaches he tacitly approved their experiments. With resources almost non-existent, Randall and Boot were forced to resort to the “string and sealing wax” approach that had characterized British physics for over a hundred years. High-voltage transformers were scrounged from the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth, while an old teaching electromagnet was unearthed in one of the university labs. Other components, like the copper anode and high-voltage rectifiers, Randal and Boot manufactured themselves. Emblematic of the make-do-and-mend nature of the endeavour, the ends of the prototype were vacuum sealed using two half-penny coins and sealing wax. The methods used to test the exotic new device were equally crude; to measure its power output, Randall and Boot connected the magnetron to a series of light bulbs, increasing the power until the bulb burned out before swapping in a new one. By this method they measured the maximum output at a whopping 400 watts. To measure the emitted wavelength, they used an apparatus known as a Lecher Line – a pair of parallel wires attached to the magnetron along which a light bulb could be slid, the bulb lighting up at each half-wavelength. To the pair’s astonishment, their first prototype produced a wavelength of 9.87 centimetres – almost exactly what they were aiming for.

News of the breakthrough at the University of Birmingham spread like wildfire through the British military establishment, who immediately ordered that top priority be given to its refinement and deployment. By June 1940 the General Electric Company laboratories in Wembley, Essex had developed the NT98, the first practical, mass-producible air-cooled cavity magnetron light enough to be installed in aircraft. These early magnetrons suffered from the problem of random frequency-jumping, but this was soon solved by Dr. J. Sayers by “strapping” alternate resonant cavities with heavy copper wires. So urgent was the need for these magnetrons that the first production models were manufactured in great haste using a drilling jig made from a Colt revolver cylinder. In August 1940, with Britain under threat of Nazi invasion, a delegation of scientists known as the Tizard Mission travelled to the United States bearing Britain’s most important technical breakthroughs – including an early production cavity magnetron. This gift allowed magnetrons to be mass-produced in American factories and opened the doors for further exchanges of key military technology.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the cavity magnetron to the course of the Second World War, with this now largely overlooked breakthrough ranking higher than more well-known technical developments like jet propulsion or the atomic bomb. Indeed, American historian James Phinney Baxter III later declared the magnetron to be “The most valuable cargo ever to reach these shores.”

In late 1941, British Bristol Beaufighter night fighter aircraft began being equipped with the Airborne Intercept or AI Mk.VII radar, which produced a narrow, 25 kilowatt beam with a wavelength of 9.1 centimetres that could accurately pinpoint enemy aircraft in pitch-darkness at a range of between 120 metres and 10 kilometres. Previous Airborne Intercept radars operating at a wavelength of 1.5 metres were plagued by random echoes from the ground below, limiting their effective range to around 5 kilometres. This technology allowed the Royal Air Force to finally sweep the Luftwaffe from British skies, bringing the dreaded Blitz to an end.

Meanwhile, centrimetric radars fitted Royal Navy and RAF Coastal Command aircraft like the Vickers Wellington, Consolidated B-24 Liberator, and Consolidated PBY Catalina allowed them to detect even the periscopes of submerged German U-boats. Previously, these aircraft were fitted with the less sophisticated Air to Surface Vessel or ASV Mk.II radar operating at a wavelength of 1.25 metres. While these sets allowed aircraft to detect a surfaced U-boat at a range of 100 kilometres, the Germans soon developed a detector called Metox that allowed them to crash-dive and escape before an attacking aircraft came into firing range. With the introduction of the magnetron-based ASV Mk.III, however, the U-boats had nowhere to hide and were forced to spend more and more time submerged, greatly reducing their effectiveness. More than any other breakthrough, the cavity magnetron helped turn the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest-fought of the entire war and the only one which Winston Churchill admitted truly frightened him.

The magnetron also played a major role in the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany and occupied Europe. As previously mentioned, when the British switched from daylight to night bombing early in the war, they discovered that accurately reaching and bombing specific targets using traditional methods like celestial navigation and dead reckoning was all but impossible. RAF Bomber Command thus switched from precision bombing of industrial and military targets like factories and airfields to a strategy of “Area Bombing” with incendiaries against large population centres. They also copied the pathfinder strategy pioneered by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz wherein an elite group of aircraft with highly-skilled navigators flew ahead of the main bomber force to mark the target with flares and incendiary bombs. To further increase their accuracy, the pathfinders soon adopted a variety of electronic navigation aids, another technique copied from the Germans. The first of these, codenamed Gee, was introduced operationally in 1942 and consisted of three transmitting stations designated A, B, and C spaced around 160 kilometres apart. These stations transmitted synchronized pulses such that depending on his position, an aircraft navigator would receive the pulses from one of the stations ahead of the others. If all the points where all three signals were received simultaneously were plotted, they formed long hyperbolic curves known as isochrones – similar to the isobar pressure lines on a weather map. These curves intersected with each other at certain points, forming a huge grid projected across the European continent – hence the codename “Gee” for “Grid” – against which aircraft could fix their position. The great advantage of Gee was that it was entirely passive, the receiving aircraft emitting no signals which could give away its position, and could be used by any number of aircraft at once. Also, unlike German beam systems, it gave no indication as to the target of a particular raid. Gee inspired the creation of a similar American system known as LORAN or LOng RAnge Navigation, which remained in use until the 1980s as a general maritime navigation aid for personal and commercial vessels.

However, while Gee could get a bomber to a particular city, it was not accurate enough to guide it over a specific target like a factory and had a maximum range of 250 kilometres – too short to reach the heart of Germany. Consequently, in early 1943 the British developed a more sophisticated system codenamed Oboe. Unlike Gee, Oboe was an active system, incorporating a special transceiver aboard the aircraft which received and returned signals from a pair of transmitting stations in Britain. The first, dubbed Cat, kept the bomber flying along a circular course intersecting with the target. If the pilot drifted off this course, he heard a string of Morse Code dots or dashes in his headphones as in the ubiquitous Lorenz blind landing system, prompting him to correct left or right. Meanwhile, the second station, codenamed Mouse, kept track of the bomber’s position and sent a signal when it was over the target, automatically triggering the release of bombs. The accuracy of Oboe was around 100 metres at 400 kilometres – enough to hit a factory in Germany’s industrial Ruhr area. However, it could not reach as far as Berlin and, being an active system, gave off signals that German night fighters could home in on. The British thus set about developing a self-contained navigation system whose reach would only be limited by the range of the aircraft carrying it.

This system took the form of H2S, a modified version of the Airborne Intercept radar pointed downwards, allowing ground features like coastlines, rivers and canals, and towns to be identified in pitch darkness or through thick cloud. This was accomplished using a rotating parabolic antenna caused in a streamlined radome and a circular plan position indicator with a persistent phosphor that refreshed itself with every rotation of the cursor – the classic image of a radar screen we are all familiar with today. The system was originally named BN for Blind Navigation, but was soon renamed H2S – the chemical formula of the pungent gas Hydrogen Sulphide – allegedly after a comment made by Professor Frederick Lindemann, scientific advisor to Winston Churchill:

“It was stinking because it ought to have been done years before!”

Interestingly, the RAF was initially hesitant to deploy H2S since it was feared that the Germans would capture and copy the top-secret magnetron technology. Indeed, experiments had proven that the copper anode at the heart of the magnetron was virtually indestructible and would likely survive even the most violent crash or self-destruct charge largely intact. Technicians were thus assigned to develop an alternate version using the well-known Klystron tubes, but this proved technically infeasible. In the end, the strategic benefits of deploying H2S were deemed to outweigh the risks, and the system was first deployed on a mission in January 1943 when Short Stirling and Handley Page Halifax bombers of 7 and 38 Squadrons successfully located and marked the city of Hamburg in extremely bad weather. H2S played a vital role in the latter stages of the Allied Bombing campaign in Europe, while a similar blind bombing radar called the AN/APQ-10 was used by American Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers against targets in Japan. As predicted, the Germans did manage to capture and copy magnetrons from downed allied aircraft and produce their own centimetric airborne intercept radar – codenamed Berlin – but these did not see service before the war ended.

One of the Allies’ greatest secret weapons, the cavity magnetron made an outsized contribution to the war effort, likely shortening the conflict by several years. This is particularly impressive given that Randall and Boot’s original prototype – including the halfpenny pieces used to seal the ends – is estimated to have cost only £200 – a bargain by any measure. Other radar technology played a similarly key role in the conflict. For example, tiny radar sets known as proximity fuzes were placed inside anti-aircraft artillery shells, allowing them to explode when they passed close to a target. Such fuzes were vital in allowing the U.S. Navy to fend off Japanese Kamikaze suicide aircraft attacks and the British to defeat the German V-1 flying bomb or “doodlebug” – and for more on this incredible battle, please check out our previous video A Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon. And radar altimeters based on tail warning radar sets were used to detonate the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, helping to deliver the killing blows that finally brought the war to an end.

By this point, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with microwave ovens. Well, as you’ll recall from the very beginning of the video, microwaves are defined as electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between one metre and one millimetre – exactly the kind of radiation generated by a cavity magnetron. But while experiments with cooking food using shortwave radiation had been conducted before the war, it took a happy – and hilarious – accident for the wartime sword of radar to be beaten into the peacetime ploughshare of everyone’s favourite kitchen appliance.

In 1945, Percy Spencer, an engineer at the Raytheon Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was working on the magnetron of an active radar set when he reached into his pocket for a snack. To his surprise, he discovered that his Mr. Goodbar chocolate bar had somehow melted into a sticky mess. This effect had been observed by several other technicians, but Spencer was determined to know more. He thus embarked on a series of legendary experiments, as recounted in a 1958 Reader’s Digest article:

“He sent a boy out for a package of popcorn. When he held it near a magnetron, popcorn exploded all over the lab. Next morning he brought in a kettle, cut a hole in the side and put an uncooked egg (in its shell) into the pot. Then he moved a magnetron against the hole and turned on the juice. A skeptical engineer peeked over the top of the pot just in time to catch a face-full of cooked egg. The reason? The yolk cooked faster than the outside, causing the egg to burst.”

These experiments confirmed that it was indeed the microwaves emitted by the magnetron – and not something else like radiated heat – that was heating up the food. Today, we know that microwave ovens work because the constantly-changing electromagnetic field causes molecules like water and fat with a strong dipole structure – that is, one negatively and one positively-charged end – to rotate rapidly, generating heat that is transferred to the rest of the food. This is why dry, low-fat foods like crackers don’t heat up when placed in a microwave oven. Contrary to popular belief, however, microwave ovens don’t cook food “from the inside out.” Rather, this effect occurs when there is a greater concentration of absorbent moisture inside the food than on its surface – such as in the classic hot pocket with its tongue-searing molten lava filling. Also, microwaves emerging from the magnetron bounce around randomly inside the oven and interfere with themselves, producing zones of varying power density that can cook different regions of a food item at different rates. However, this effect is usually countered through the use of a turntable to slowly rotate the food or a motorized waveguide to more evenly distribute the microwaves around the interior of the oven.

While Spencer’s supposedly serendipitous discovery has become the stuff of legend, in reality the development of the microwave oven was a gradual process involving dozens of small discoveries and developments by multiple technicians. Nonetheless, on October 8, 1945, Spencer filed US patent 2,495,429 for a Method of Treating Foodstuffs, in which he outlined basic technical details such as the optimal frequency – 2.45 Gigahertz – power and cavity size for efficient cooking. Alarmingly, the oven design in his patent featured a conveyor belt for moving food past the magnetron and open ends which would have allowed face-melting microwave radiation to leak out of the appliance! In a follow-up patent filed in 1949, Spencer described the now-ubiquitous process of microwaving popcorn, while in a 1951 patent he described how to broil a lobster in a microwave by shoving a “pencil like rod” up its behind to prevent the tail from curling and becoming harder to cook. As if lobsters didn’t have it hard enough already…

Based on the work of Spencer and others – in particular engineers Lawrence Marshall, Fritz Gross, and Marvin Bock – in 1947 Raytheon produced the first prototype microwave oven, the first of which was installed in a Boston restaurant for testing. Another prototype was incorporated into a delightfully-named “Speedy Weeny” vending machine in New York’s Grand Central Terminal which dispensed freshly-microwaved hot dogs. Later that year, Raytheon finally launched the world’s first production commercial model under the brand name Radarange. But while today we think of microwave ovens as compact, convenient countertop appliances, the first Radaranges were absolute behemoths, standing 1.8 metres tall and weighing 340 kilograms. They consumed 3 kilowatts – three times as much as a modern microwave – and produced so much waste heat that they had to be water-cooled. With an eye-watering price tag of $5,000 – $68,000 in today’s money – these units were far out of reach for the average consumer and were intended for use in restaurants, cafeterias, airliners, and ship’s galleys – with one example being installed aboard the revolutionary nuclear-powered cargo ship and passenger liner N.S. Savannah in 1961.

In 1955, Raytheon licensed its microwave technology to appliance manufacturer Tappan, who introduced the first microwave oven designed for consumer use: the RL-1. Designed to be mounted to the wall like a conventional oven, the RL-1 still cost a whopping $1,295 – $11,000 in today’s money – resulting in disappointing sales. But technology was rapidly improving, and soon more reasonably-priced models with lighter, air-cooled magnetrons began to appear on the market. In 1964 the Sharp Corporation of Japan introduced the first microwave oven with a rotating turntable to address the traditional problem of uneven heating. And at around the same time, the Litton Company developed a magnetron that could survive a no-load condition – that is, running with nothing in the oven to absorb the microwaves – making microwave ovens much safer and long-lasting. Finally, in 1967, the Amana Corporation, a subsidiary of Raytheon, introduced the countertop Radarange, the first compact microwave oven as we would recognize it today. This model took an unusual approach to promoting even food heating, using a rotating wave guide or mode stirrer to distribute the microwave beam, allowing the food to remain stationary. With a price tag of $495 – $5,000 in today’s dollars – it was still very expensive, but with simplified designs and advances in manufacturing techniques the price gradually fell and throughout the 1970s and 80s microwave ovens began to be found in more and more homes. Indeed, while only around 40,000 microwave ovens were sold in the United States in 1970, by 1975 this number had risen to nearly one million. And while only 1% of American households owned a microwave oven in 1971, by 1986 around 25% did. By 1997, this figure had risen to an astonishing 90%. With the exception of Japan, where the popularity of microwaves benefitted from simpler and cheaper to manufacture magnetron designs, adoption has been slower elsewhere in the world, with 88% of Canadian, 65% of French, 5% of Indian, 40% of Russian, 38% of South African, and 16% of Vietnamese households owning a microwave oven by the turn of the 21st century.

And as microwave ovens became increasingly popular, manufacturers began adding additional features. For example, in the early 1970s Tappan began offering hybrid models that incorporated both microwave capability and conventional oven heating elements. In 1975, Amana introduced the first automatic defrost feature with their RR-4D model, while the following year their RR-6 model incorporated the first fully digital, microprocessor-controlled control panel. Since then, microwave ovens have more or less settled around a standard design, with different brands or models differing largely in their styling, control panel layout, and number of cooking modes like defrost, popcorn etc. Indeed, as of 2020, nearly all microwave ovens sold in the United States, regardless of brand, are manufactured by a single company: the Midea Group, headquartered in Beijiao, China. Most consumer microwave ovens consume between 600-1200 Watts of power and operate at the same 2.45 Gigahertz frequency established by Percy Spencer in 1945. As many telecommunications technologies operate at microwave frequencies, in 1947 Raytheon and General Electric petitioned the Federal Communications Commission or FCC to set aside a section of the electromagnetic spectrum for use by microwave ovens, medical diathermy machines, and other specialized equipment so as not to interfere with vital communications networks. The two allocated frequencies, 915 +/- 25 Megahertz and 2450 +/-50 Megahertz, are today known as the Industrial/Scientific/Medical or ISM bands. The 915 Megahertz frequency is commonly used by industrial microwave ovens as the longer wavelength penetrates deeper into the food and raises its temperature faster, speeding up the overall cooking process.

Interestingly, no matter how many power or specialized cooking settings a microwave has, the magnetron always operates at a constant power output. Different heat settings are thus achieved through duty-cycle modulation i.e. switching the magnetron on and off for different period of time. This way, the rate and total amount of energy deposited into the food can be controlled. For example, if a microwave is set to half power, then the magnetron will be switched on only half the time. Similarly, since ice absorbs microwaves less efficiently than liquid water, the defrost setting keeps the magnetron switched on for even less of the total cooking time, allowing the food to defrost slowly without overheating and prematurely cooking it. By contrast, inverter microwaves use solid-state switching gear as opposed to the traditional transformer and electronic relay, allowing them to operate the magnetron continuously at low power. This heats the food more slowly and evenly, preventing the formation of hot spots that can prematurely cook or ruin sensitive, sugar and fat-rich foods like meat, dairy, and desserts. In addition, inverter microwaves tend to be more energy-efficient than more traditional designs.

Given their ability to cook meat and fish, it goes without saying that the microwaves produced by a magnetron are potentially dangerous to living tissue. Particularly vulnerable is the eye which, having no cooling blood vessels of its own, is prone to overheating when exposed to microwaves, potentially resulting in the formation of cataracts later in life.Thankfully, the microwaves produced by a microwave oven are fully contained by the appliance’s metallic case, which acts as a Faraday cage – named after the great English physicist Michael Faraday. Faraday cages exploit the fact that rapidly-changing electromagnetic fields cannot penetrate a closed electrical conductor, and are widely used to protect sensitive electronic equipment from external radio frequency interference or RFI or – in this case – to prevent electromagnetic radiation from getting out. But the walls of a Faraday cage need not be solid; so long as any openings are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation in question, said radiation will be effectively blocked. This is why the window in the door of most microwave ovens is covered in a fine metal mesh. Further safety is provided by a set of interlock switches that prevents the magnetron from operating while the door is open. Thanks to these features, you can watch your microwave burrito spin round and round without fear of your face melting off.

And of course, no discussion of microwave ovens would be complete without addressing that most taboo of household scientific experiments: putting metal in the microwave. The reason this is generally frowned upon is because metallic objects like forks and aluminium foil act like radio antennas, absorbing microwave energy and converting it to an electric charge. If the object in question has sharp edges, these will concentrate this electric charge, exceeding the breakdown potential of the surrounding air and throwing off lightning-like arcs called corona discharges that can potentially start a fire. Even worse, smoother metallic objects can reflect microwaves back at the magnetron, causing feedback that can ultimately overload and destroy the component, rendering the entire oven useless. Finally, absorbed microwaves can cause metallic objects to become extremely hot, posing a burn hazard. Indeed, this effect is sometimes exploited by manufacturers of microwaved food. The packaging for pizzas, pies, and other items that would normally become soggy when cooked in a microwave often incorporate a thin metallic layer that absorbs and radiates heat back onto the food, creating a deliciously crispy crust. But unless you have a special microwave set aside specifically for mad scientific experiments, please take our advice: just don’t do it.

Now, while radar sets and microwave ovens are the most common and famous applications for the magnetron, they are far from the only ones. Indeed, high-powered microwave emitters are widely used in industry for applications as diverse as softening plastic before moulding, drying potato chips, and roasting coffee beans and peanuts. And newer, more exotic applications are being discovered all the time. For example, in 2023, researchers at Australia’s Macquarie University developed a method for using microwaves to selectively decompose the silicon in expired solar panels, allowing the other component materials like glass, plastic, and metal to be safely recycled. In the traditional recycling method, solar panels are crushed, heated to 1400 degrees Celsius, and treated with harsh solvents to dissolve away the plastic components – an energy-intensive and environmentally unfriendly process. Similarly, in 2022 researchers at Mitsui Chemicals in Japan announced a method for using microwaves to decompose polyurethane foam into its component chemicals without the use of toxic solvents. Meanwhile, a team at the Korea Electrotechnology Institute or KERI led by Dr. Sunshin Jung has developed a device designed to bombard agricultural fields with microwave radiation, selectively killing pests hidden under the soil without the need for pesticides. Even more exotic, engineers at Penn State University has devised a microwave-based method that could eventually be transported to the moon and used to smelt minerals found in the lunar dust or regolith – either to extract valuable metals like titanium or build permanent strictures on the lunar surface. In the grand tradition of cheeky tech acronyms, the team dubbed their creation Smelting with Microwave Energy for Lunar Technologies System for In-Situ Resource Processing – or SMELT.

From defeating the Nazis and Imperial Japanese to making dinnertime a bit more convenient to smelting metals on the moon, the cavity magnetron has come a long way, and stands as one of the greatest stories of swords into ploughshares in modern history. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a frozen burrito with my name on it…

The post Defeating the Nazis- The Twisting, Turning Road That Gave Us the Microwave Oven appeared first on Today I Found Out.

Running the gauntlet. Starting. Flogging with the cat ‘o 9 nine tails. Gagging. Clapping in irons. Hanging from the yardarm. While this all might sound like a super fun Saturday night with the misses when the grandparents are watching your kiddos for you, it turns out these are actually just a few of the dizzying array of corporal and capital punishments inflicted upon sailors of old – both navy men and pirates – to enforce discipline and punish a wide variety of crimes. But while most of these punishments are fairly well-known, you may have noticed two notable practices missing from the list: that old staple of pirate movies, “walking the plank”… and keel-hauling. Perhaps the most infamous of all nautical punishments, keel-hauling struck such fear into the hearts of sailors over the centuries that the term survives to this day as a byword for particularly harsh discipline. But what was keel-hauling? How did it work, who invented it, and was it actually a real thing? Or, like so much popular seamen lore, was it just the product of some adventure writer’s imagination? Well, put on your eyepatch and tricorn hat, strap on your peg-leg, as we dive into the reality of one of the Age of Sail’s most barbaric practices.

Punishments similar to keel-hauling are thought to date back to antiquity, though the actual historical record is rather sparse. Ancient Greek writings from the 5th Century B.C., contain references to katapontismós: to throw someone from a high place  into water; and schinismόs: to tie someone up and drop them from a high place. However, the former may simply refer to the practice of tossing someone overboard; indeed, in his Histories, Herodotus uses the term when referring to an incident in which Persian King Xerxes I was caught in a storm at sea and forced some of his soldiers to jump overboard to lighten his ship. Similarly, schinismόs may refer to the perennial torture technique of strappado, in which the victim’s arms are bound behind them and winched up on a rope, dislocating their shoulders. Other executions by drowning are also recorded throughout antiquity, such as with the murderers of Ancient Greek poet Hesiod in 650 B.C.. and of 3,000 Phocian prisoners by Philip II of Macedon during the Third Sacred War of 356-346, well, I’ll go with B.C.E. this time for maximal commenting by using both in the same piece.

However, these accounts give no details of the methods or equipment employed. The most solid evidence of ancient keel-hauling comes from the Lecythos of Attica, a vase dating from around 480 B.C.E. which depicts sailors binding fellow crewmen and lowering them into the water.

While similar practices are mentioned in the Byzantine maritime code or Lex Rhodia of 700 CE as a punishment for piracy, detailed descriptions of the practice as we would recognize it today do not appear until a millennium later, with one of the earliest being from Christopher Frick and Christopher Schewitzer’s 1700 account A Relation of Two Several Voyages Made into the East-Indies:

“He that strikes an Officer, or Master of the Ship, is without hopes of pardon to be thrown into the Sea fasten’d by a Rope, with which he is thrown in on one side of the Ship, and drawn up again on the other, and so three times together he is drawn round the Keel of the Ship, in the doing of which, if they should chance not to allow Rope enough to let him sink below the Keel, the Malefactor might have his brains knockt out. This Punishment is called Keel-halen, which may be call’d in English “Keel-drawing.” But the Provost hath this Priviledge more than the other, that if any one strikes him on Shoar, he forfeits his hand, if on Board, then he is certainly Keel-draw’d.”

While this punishment was in use – both officially and unofficially – in the Royal Navy at this time, in British writings it is nearly always referred to as an exclusively Dutch practice – very often with a great deal of xenophobic disdain. For instance, William Falconer’s 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine defines the practice as:

“A punishment inflicted for various offences in the Dutch navy. It is performed by plunging the delinquent repeatedly over the ship’s bottom on one side, and hoisting him up on the other, having passed under the keel. The blocks, or pullies, by which he is suspended, are fastened to the opposite extremities of the main-yard, and a weight of lead or iron is hung upon his legs to sink him to a competent depth. By this apparatus he is drawn close up to the yard-arm, and thence let fall suddenly into the sea, where passing under the ship’s bottom, he is hoisted upon the opposite side of the vessel, As this extraordinary sentence is executed with a serenity of temper peculiar to the Dutch, the culprit is allowed sufficient intervals to recover the sense of pain, of which indeed he is frequently deprived during the operation. In truth, a temporary insensibility to his sufferings ought by no means to be construed into a disrespect of his judges, when we consider that this punishment is supposed to have a peculiar propriety in the depth of winter, whilst the flakes of ice are floating on the stream, and that it it is continued till the culprit is almost suffocated for want of air, benumbed with the cold of the water, or stunned with the blows his head receives by striking the ship’s bottom.”

Indeed, drowning was the least of the keel-hauling victim’s worries, and may well have been welcomed as a sweet release from his torments. The hull of the ship would likely have been encrusted with barnacles and other sea life, cutting the condemned to ribbons as they were hauled across it. For this reason, common practice was to perform keel hauling as quickly as possible – not to minimize the victim’s time spent underwater, but rather to ensure they were scraped along the hull rather than sinking down clear of it. If the ship was new or had recently been cleaned, the hauling was often performed end to end rather than beam-to-beam to extend the victim’s torment. And if, when hauled up, the victim was judged insufficiently drowned or maimed, they would often be thrown overboard and keel-hauled all over again or sometimes flogged on the ship’s deck. Some sources also describe a sponge being forced into the victim’s mouth, allowing them to draw at least one tiny extra breath while underwater.

Keel-hauling is thought to have been introduced to the Dutch Navy and Dutch East India Company or VOC sometime in the mid-17th century. One of the earliest recorded cases involved a sailor by the name of Jan Blank, who in October 1652 was convicted of desertion and, as punishment, was keelhauled, given 150 lashes, and sentenced to slavery for two years.

While records of keel-hauling aboard Dutch ships during this period are sparse, it was apparently a common enough practice to warrant depiction in Lieve Pietersz’s painting The keelhauling of the Ship’s Surgeon of Admiral Jan van Nes, completed sometime between 1660 and 1680. The painting depicts keel-hauling as a public punishment, with ships full of sailors gathered around to witness the spectacle. This suggests that the practice was largely reserved for the most serious offences and used to set an example for the rest of the fleet. In this way it served a similar function to the Royal Navy practice of “Flogging Around the Fleet,” in which the victim was rowed around the fleet in a small boat, receiving a certain number of lashes at each ship.

While the exact origin of keel-hauling is not known, it is likely the practice evolved from the older punishment of ducking or cucking, which also may just seem like a fun Saturday night for you, but in the original meaning included a victim briefly lowered into the sea or a river using a rope or specialized seesaw-like ducking stool. Though best known today for its use in identifying witches, in reality ducking was used to punish people – usually women – for a wide variety of crimes and socially unacceptable behaviours, including scolding, gossip, blasphemy, adultery, or bearing a child out of wedlock. In France, ducking evolved into a naval punishment wherein the victim was bound, tied to a rope, and repeatedly thrown overboard and hauled back up. A common variation on this punishment was “dry ducking”, in which the victim was thrown overboard as before but halted just short of hitting the water. Often cannonballs or other weights were attached to the victim’s feet to increase the shock and pain of the sudden stop. This punishment was infamously applied to François-Marie Perrot, governor of the French colony of Acadia (today parts of the U.S. state of Maine and the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) from 1785 to 1787. An extraordinarily corrupt man, during his brief tenure, Perrot amassed an enormous fortune by secretly trading furs with local indigenous peoples and issuing illegal licenses to New England fishermen. After being ousted as Governor, Perrot took refuge in St. John River, New Brunswick, where he was immediately captured by pirates and tortured using this technique until he revealed the location of his riches. He was soon rescued by French corsairs and returned to France, but died not long afterward, likely of some of the injuries inflicted by the pirates.

Meanwhile, in French service full keel-hauling differed slightly from the Dutch version in that the victim, hauling ropes, and weights were all tied to a small hatchway grating and the whole assembly thrown overboard.

Yet despite its enduring infamy, the heyday of keel-hauling as an official punishment – at least in western navies – was relatively brief, with the British Royal Navy banning its use in 1720 and the Dutch and French Navies in 1750. It did, however, continue to be used very rarely in an unofficial capacity. However, due to its association with barbarism and – well, the Dutch, the Royal Navy was very quick to deny any and all allegations of keel-hauling being performed aboard their ships. For example, the British Parliamentary record for September 4, 1880 contains the following exchange:

1. P. A. TAYLOR: asked the Secretary to the Admiralty, Whether he is aware that a statement has appeared in certain Italian newspapers (Palermo and Messina) alleging that a Marine, of H.M.S. “Alexandra,” was lately condemned to be keel-hauled and died under the punishment; and, whether he will institute inquiries upon the subject? The hon. Gentleman added that the newspapers had been ostensibly sent to him by an English officer.
2. SHAW LEFEVRE: Sir, it is wholly impossible that there can be any truth in the story reported in the Italian papers, that a Marine has been keelhauled on board the Alexandra, and died under the punishment. We have heard nothing about it, and I do not think it is necessary to insult the officers of the ship by asking whether it is true. The last reference to keel-hauling in the Navy is contained in a well-known story of the Emperor Paul of Russia, which shows that in his day there was a current belief on the Continent that this punishment was practised. When he came on board a man-of-war he asked to see the process, and when he was told that it would cause the death of the seaman, he offered one of his staff for the experiment. The editor of the Italian paper was about as well informed as the retailer of this anecdote. I do not think it necessary to make further inquiry.

However, the practice did persist officially in other navies for much, much longer, with perhaps the most infamous case taking place in Alexandria, Egypt, in September 1882. The event was recorded in gruesome detail by a correspondent from the London Morning Advertiser, revealing many of the more horrific aspects of the practice:

“Yesterday I tried to write a description of the most horrible sight. It was so revoltingly cruel, so barbarous, so infamously brutal, that I gave it up. Still, it is right that the people of England should know what sort of people even the friendly Egyptians are, and therefore this story of how two men were keelhauled from on board the Mehemet Ali,…

Just before noon the men were brought on deck and pinioned with their arms behind their backs, their hands before them, and ankle-irons  confining their feet so that they could barely walk. The crew of the ship had been called on deck. The officers stood on the starboard side, the crew on the port, the victims at the mainmast. The officers were in the flaunting dress of their service, the men wore their cutlasses. An officer read the findings – at least that was what we supposed they were – of the court martial. This was a long and protracted ceremony. When he had done some men went aloft and made fast to the mainstay near the mast two blocks. From these they rove two stout lines in different directions. These were carried over the sides of the ship and weighted with a sounding-lead about 40 feet from the end. Then the lines were carried around the stern of the ship and brought forward, the leads sinking them under the keel. After that they were hauled on board, the leads detached, the two men were tied side by side, and both ropes made fast to them, one rope being tied to the waist of one, the other rope around the shoulders of the other. The arrangement of the tackles was to drag the men under the ship from either side by hauling on the fall or running end of the rope that fell from the leading blocks on the mainstay. These ropes, to enable the hauling parties to “walk away”, were led through a snatch-block on the deck The crew were then divided, half of them out to each rope, and the two wretches, being led to the side, were shoved overboard. They both screamed as they fell into the water and as the distance from the gangway to the surface was quite 14 feet, they must have been more or less hurt.

But this was only the beginning of their misery. The men on one side hauled taut the rope underneath the ship, and then the order to ‘walk away’ was given. The band played a solemn tune, something like the ‘Carnival of Venice’ in movement, except the tune was changed, and stamp, stamp, stamp, went the men. We saw the two wretches go under, and then the only movement was the ropes going through their blocks, one side coming out the other coming in, but slowly. We had no measurement of the ship, but as the rope acted directly – that is, there were no moving blocks – the distance around the bottom was exactly that covered by the men as they walked the deck, drawing the rope behind them, Thus we were able to make some estimate of the distance, and we calculated it at 50 feet from surface to surface. 

Presently the two victims appeared on the other side They were hauled quite out of the water, and the rope by which they were hoisted was made easy and coiled up ready to pay out again. An officer – probably a doctor – went down and examined them. The one upon whom the strain of the rope had fallen was apparently lifeless. His face was turned toward us: it was bleeding and torn; his clothes were hanging in shreds and his hands were dripping with blood. His eyes were open, but they seemed to be filled with blood. The ship’s bottom, covered with barnacles, rasped upon the poor devils like nails. The other man seemed to be conscious. His back, as he hung in the air, was toward us, but he moved his head, we thought, and apparently to beg for mercy. 

Evidently the officer reported them still alive, for when he had come on deck again the two men were lowered into the water, and the crew manning the rope that led up from the other side marched away with it, and once more the victims disappeared. From the time they went under the surface of the water until they reappeared at the other side of the ship was just 24 seconds. It seemed to us to have been an hour. The first frightful journey had terminated by their being scratched and torn; at the end of the second they were mutilated. The nose of one wretch was torn almost away, one ear was gone, and the shreds of the clothing he had worn clung to him only where they were held by his bonds. He was blood literally from head to foot. His companion’s condition was equally horrible. This time they were hoisted up to the rail and swung on board. Then we could see something of the action of the barbarous punishment, for they were not held off the side, but were scraped up along the ship, striking against the ringbolts, the chains, and every cruel obstruction until they swung in free over the deck. Then they were lowered down and released. They were both unconscious, even then dead. It may be hoped they were. Death must have been a welcome release. 

An inquiry as to the facts made on board the ship elicited the reply that it was not a matter of public concern Nevertheless we were offered coffee and cigarettes. It is needless to say that we did not accept either. For my part I should have rather seen the entire ship’s company shot than accepted any hospitality at the hands of its officers.”

And that is the brief and horrific history of keel-hauling, a relatively rare punishment in the Age of Sail but one spine-chilling enough to persist for centuries in the popular imagination. At this point, however, you are probably wondering: what about that other favourite punishment for scurvy sea dogs: walking the plank?

Well, sorry to disappoint you, but unlike keel-hauling there is not a shred of evidence that anyone was ever forced to walk the plank during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy – typically defined as the 80-year period between the 1650s and 1730s, though the practice is known to have happened after its apparently fictitious origins. Indeed, the first written description of walking the plank appears near the tail end of this period in Daniel Defoe’s 1724 book A General History of the Pyrates, in which he describes Ancient pirates in the Mediterranean pushing a ship’s ladder out over the water and telling their Roman captives they were free to go – if they could swim the distance back to shore. Like all great literary devices, later writers took Defoe’s “plank” and turned it into a staple of pirate fiction, with the practice appearing in Charles Ellms’s 1856 bestseller The Pirates Own Book,  Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island, and J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play and 1904 novel Peter Pan.

This is not to say, however, that nobody ever walked the plank – just that such incidents were incredibly rare and took place long after the Golden Age of Piracy. For instance, in 1769 mutineer George Wood, locked up in London’s Newgate Prison, confessed to the prison chaplain that he and his fellow mutineers had forced the officers on their ship to:

“…walk on a plank, extended from the ship’s side, over the sea, in which they were turned, when at the extreme end.”

In an even grimmer incident in 1788, the slave transport ship Garland ran short of food during its Atlantic crossing. In order to preserve their remaining stocks, the crew forced many of the slaves onboard to “walk the plank” to their watery doom. But there is some justice – however minor – to this story, for the food did eventually run out before Garland reached her destination, forcing the crew to resort to cannibalism to survive.

A handful of other cases of “walking the plank” are recorded throughout the 19th century. For example, in July 1822, the British sloop Blessing was captured by the Spanish pirate schooner Emmanuel in the Caribbean and her captain, William Smith, forced to walk the plank. In 1828 a similar fate befell the crew of the former Royal Navy Brig HMS Redpole, which, while carrying mail from Brazil to Britain, was captured and sunk by a Brazilian pirate vessel. And that same year, the Dutch brig Vhan Fredericka was captured by pirates near the Virgin Islands and her crew forced to walk the plank with cannonballs tied to their feet.

And that’s it: those are the few actual recorded cases of people being forced to walk the plank. As with so many fixtures of pirate lore such as parrots, eyepatches, peg legs, treasure maps, and – yes – even “talking like a pirate” – while there is a grain of truth to this practice, it was nowhere near as common as popular books, movies, shows, and other media would have us believe. But that hasn’t stopped us here from adopting walking the plank and keel-hauling as our official punishments for our basement dwellers when they try to do anything but work as god intended. Got to keep your employees properly motivated, you know?

The post Was Keel-Hauling Actually a Thing? appeared first on Today I Found Out.

Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.

We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man.

Steve Austin will be that man, better than he was before.

Better, stronger, faster.

So goes the iconic opening of the classic 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors as the titular astronaut-turned-cyborg secret agent. While the central premise of the show is pure science fiction, amazingly the exotic wingless spacecraft Austin crashes in the title sequence is not the product of some production designer’s fevered imagination. Rather, this sequence uses footage of an actual aircraft – the Northrop M2-F2 – which crashed during a test flight on May 10, 1967. The M2-F2 was one in a long line of experimental aircraft known as lifting bodies, which lack conventional wings and instead use their specially-shaped fuselages to generate lift. As discussed in our previous video $2 Billion Each – a Deep Dive Into the Incredible Engineering That Culminated in the B-2 Stealth Bomber, even in the earliest days of aviation, engineers realized that the conventional aircraft layout of two wings, a fuselage, and an empennage or tail was not necessarily the most effective. The quest for the ultimate flying machine – the aircraft boiled down to its purest, most aerodynamically efficient form – led to the development of the “flying wing”, which has no fuselage, tail surfaces, or other extraneous features. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the development of the lifting body was born of the desire to fly not within earth’s atmosphere, but outside of it, and may hold the key to making regular, affordable, and safe space travel a practical reality. This is the fascinating story of the bizarre aircraft without wings.

Our story begins in early 1944, as Nazi Germany prepared to unleash a new generation of terrifying secret weapons upon the Allies. Known as vergelstungwaffe or “vengeance weapons,” these would allow Germany to strike back at the British Isles as revenge for the round-the-clock bombing raids which had devastated German cities over the past year. The first of these, the Fieseler Fi.103 or V-1, was a small pilotless “flying bomb”, the ancestor of modern cruise missiles. Powered by a simple pulse jet engine and launched by a steam catapult from sites scattered around Northern France, the V-1 was guided by simple autopilot towards its target, whereupon an automatic system would dive the missile into the ground to deliver its one-ton high-explosive warhead. V-1 operations against London began on June 13, 1944, barely two weeks after the D-Day landings in Normandy; 9,521 would be launched, inflicting nearly 23,000 casualties, before the Allied advance across western Europe pushed the launch sites out of range – and for more on this, please check out our previous video On a Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon.

The second V-weapon was even more technologically advanced – and terrifying. Known as the Aggregat 4 or simply the V-2 rocket, this was the world’s first operational ballistic missile. Fuelled by a combination of alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V-2 climbed to an altitude of 88 kilometres – touching the edge of outer space – before descending onto its target at twice the speed of sound. Unlike the V-1, which made a distinctive motorcycle-like sound and was eventually defeated by a combination of accurate anti-aircraft fire and high-speed fighter aircraft, the V-2 approached silently and was all but unstoppable. However, it was also far more complicated, unreliable, and expensive to manufacture, and its combat debut was delayed numerous times. While initial development was carried out at the Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic coast, following Operation Hydra, a massive RAF air rad on August 17, 1943, testing was moved to Blizna in occupied Poland, outside the range of Allied aircraft. However, unexpected problems soon appeared as rocket after rocket began breaking up in mid-flight, causing twisted debris to rain down on the test range. Between November 1943 and March 1944, only four of the 26 successful launches reached the target area in Sarnaki, 200 kilometres to the north. Despite firing dozens more rockets over the following months, engineers were unable to determine the cause of the airbursts, though excessive propellant tank pressure was suspected. In the end, they were forced to implement a stopgap solution: metal sleeves nicknamed “tin trousers” placed over the propellant tanks to strengthen them. Operational V-2 launches finally began six months later. From September 7, 1944 to March 27, 1945, 3,172 V-2s were fired against targets in the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany, killing some 5,000 people. However, the rockets themselves were largely built by forced labourers from concentration camps, some 10,000 of whom died in the process – making the V-2 the only weapon in history to kill more people in its construction than in combat.

But while the V-2 failed to turn the tide of the Second World War, it would play a significant role in shaping the postwar world order. At the end of the war, the Allied powers – including the United States and Soviet Union – captured large numbers of V-2s as well as the scientists and engineers that helped design them. These men were soon put to work developing the next generation of long-range ballistic missiles, which they combined with the other great technological breakthrough of the war – the atomic bomb – to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Effectively unstoppable and capable of obliterating any city on earth at the push of a button, the intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM ultimately inspire the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD whose apocalyptic shadow would loom over the world for more than thirty years.

However, the designers of the first ICBMs faced the same problem which had previously plagued the German V-2 engineers: missiles breaking up as they fell back to earth. The initial solution was to place the warhead in a separate nosecone that would detach from the now-spent rocket fuselage and descend separately to the target. However, as this nosecone plunged through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, the air ahead of it would become compressed and heat up to temperatures of up to 2,800 degrees Celsius – hot enough to melt steel. If a means could not be found to dissipate this heat and protect warheads from burning up like meteors on reentry, then the expensive, cutting edge missiles would be all but useless.

Initially, it was assumed that the ideal form factor for atmospheric reentry was long and pointy – the classic science fiction “rocket” shape. After all, such a shape would “slice” cleanly through the air with minimal drag, reducing both compression and fictional heating. However, in the early 1950s a pair of American engineers, Harry J. Allen and Alfred J. Eggers, Jr, made a surprising discovery. Allen and Eggers worked at the Ames Research Centre in California, then run by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics or NACA. In 1958, NACA would be reorganized and renamed the National Air and Space Administration – NASA. Using models in a supersonic wind tunnel, Allen and Eggers determined that when long, slender rockets travelled through the air at supersonic speeds, the supersonic shock wave tended to hug the sides of the vehicle, depositing large amounts of heat directly into the airframe. It was this phenomenon which had caused the V-2’s propellant tanks to overheat and burst during reentry. Conversely, if the vehicle were instead made as flat and un-aerodynamic as possible, then the air would not be able to get out of the way fast enough, causing a high-pressure cushion of air to build up ahead of the vehicle. This cushion would not only insulate the vehicle, slowing the transfer of heat to its skin, but also deflect the shockwave away from it, dissipating heat into the surrounding atmosphere. Indeed, Allen and Eggers were able to demonstrate mathematically that the heat load experienced by a reentering vehicle was inversely proportional to its drag coefficient. Based on this rather counterintuitive finding, missile designers soon changed the shape of warhead reentry to high-drag “blunt bodies.”

But this was only part of the solution, for even with the proper shaping a great deal of heat would still get through to the reentry vehicle, threatening to damage or destroy the warhead. At first, this problem was addressed through the use of a heat sink – a large mass of metal like copper or beryllium that could absorb large amounts of thermal energy and prevent the warhead from overheating before it reached its target. This technique was first used in 1959 on the General Electric Mk.2 reentry vehicle for the Convair SM-65 Atlas D, the United States’s first operational ICBM – and to learn how this pioneering weapon inspired the creation of one of the world’s most versatile and beloved household products, please check out our previous video Who Invented WD-40? However, heat sinks were heavy and cumbersome and soon a new type of thermal protection system or TPS was developed: the ablative heat shield. This was composed of multiple layers of phenolic resin applied to the blunt face of the reentry vehicle; when the vehicle reentered the atmosphere, the accumulating heat would cause the resin to char and slough off – that is, to ablate – carrying the heat energy it had absorbed off into the atmosphere. This system was significantly more efficient than heat sinks, requiring relatively thin layers of lightweight resin and allowing much larger warheads to be carried. Ablative heat shields were first deployed on the G.E. Mk. 3 reentry vehicle for the Atlas, and are still used on effectively all military ballistic missiles to this day. As a side note, this design had been predicted by Robert H. Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, who wrote in 1920:

“In the case of meteors, which enter the atmosphere with speeds as high as 30 miles (48 km) per second, the interior of the meteors remains cold, and the erosion is due, to a large extent, to chipping or cracking of the suddenly heated surface. For this reason, if the outer surface of the apparatus were to consist of layers of a very infusible hard substance with layers of a poor heat conductor between, the surface would not be eroded to any considerable extent, especially as the velocity of the apparatus would not be nearly so great as that of the average meteor.”

Allen and Eggers’ discovery was initially classified as a military secret, but eventually published in 1958 – just as the newly-formed NASA was launching Project Mercury, the United States’ first manned space program. The Mercury spacecraft was designed by Maxime Faget, a Belize-born engineer working at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia. Working from the principles uncovered by Allen and Eggers, Faget chose a truncated cone or frustum which would reenter the atmosphere wide end first, forming an ideal blunt body. This blunt end was further covered in a protective heat shield, while the sides of the capsule were covered in tiles made of Rene 41 – a high temperature nickel allow – to protect the cabin from stray heat transfer. The first two manned Mercury flights – Mercury-Redstone 3 on May 5, 1961, and Mercury-Redstone 4 on July 21 – were short suborbital hops conducted at relatively low speeds, so the capsules were fitted with heat sink-style heat shields made of beryllium. However, orbital flights would reenter at much higher speeds, so for all subsequent missions his was changed to a resin ablative heat shield.

Meanwhile, engineers in the Soviet Union discovered the same design principles as the Americans, though their implementation of said principles was often somewhat different. For instance, the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft that carried Yuri Gagarin and other early cosmonauts into space featured a spherical descent module with ablative heat shield material applied all around, meaning it would protect the occupant no matter the orientation it reentered the atmosphere. However, this design often made for an unpleasant reentry experience, exposing the cosmonaut to rapidly-shifting G forces as the capsule tumbled through the atmosphere. The later Soyuz spacecraft, which is still in use today, switched to a hemispherical “headlamp”- shaped descent module more in line with American designs.

The ablative heat shield concept proved so elegant, reliable, and foolproof that it was retained on NASA’s subsequent Gemini and Apollo capsules and continues to be used on modern spacecraft like the SpaceX Dragon, Boeing Starliner, and Lockheed Martin Orion. Indeed, since the dawn of the space age, not a single manned spacecraft using an ablative heat shield has ever burned up on reentry. But while robust and reliable, ballistic space capsules have several major limitations. Incapable of being steered to a precision landing, they have to be brought down in large areas of open ocean (or, in the case of the Soviet and later Russian space programs, the vast wilderness of eastern Eurasia), require large naval or air fleets to locate and recover them. If, by contrast, a spacecraft could be landed near its launching point, recovery logistics and overall launch costs could be greatly reduced. Indeed, early in the development of the 2-man Gemini capsule, engineers proposed fitting the spacecraft with a steerable, hang-glider-esque parachute called a Rogallo Wing, invented in 1948 by NACA engineer Francis Rogallo. Controlled by cables linked to the astronauts’ regular flight controls, the Rogallo Wing would allow the crew to pilot their spacecraft to a regular landing on a runway, touching down on a set of retractable metal skids. But while extensive gliding tests were performed using mockup capsules, the system proved more difficult to perfect than anticipated, and in the interests of expediency the concept was abandoned in 1964 in favour of a more conventional round parachute and ocean splashdown.

The later Apollo spacecraft that carried American astronauts to the moon incorporated a degree of steering ability into its design. The conical shape of the capsule was carefully designed to produce a certain amount of lift during reentry, allowing it to be “flown” by the crew. This was accomplished by concentrating most of the capsule’s mass off to one side, offset from its aerodynamic centre of pressure. During reentry, the crew used the spacecraft’s reaction control system or RCS thrusters to spin the capsule around its vertical axis, varying the distance between the centre of pressure and centre of gravity and causing the capsule to “fly” at a steeper or shallower angle. In this manner, the crew could adjust their reentry trajectory, allowing them to land closer to the recovery fleet.

But the ultimate dream of spacecraft designers was a winged, fully-steerable vehicle – a “space plane” that could land on a runway like a regular aircraft. Indeed, plans for such a vehicle even predate the start of the Space Race. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force began developing a small 2-man space plane called the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar – short for Dynamic Soarer – based on an earlier concept called the Silbervogel or “Silver Bird” developed by German rocket engineer Eugen Sänger – and for more on this astonishing design, please check out our previous video The Nazi Space Shuttle. Launched atop a modified Titan II ballistic missile, the Dyna-Soar would either enter earth orbit or skip along the top of the atmosphere – a manoeuvre called “boost-glide” – to carry out a variety of military missions, including high-altitude reconnaissance and orbital bombing. In 1958, the Air Force also launched a parallel project known as the Aerospaceplane – later the Recoverable Orbital Launch System or ROLS – to develop an even more advanced spaceplane that could fly directly into space without the need for a separate disposable booster – a capability known as Single Stage to Orbit or SSTO. The ROLS would incorporate numerous cutting-edge technologies, including a Liquid Air Collection System that would pull oxygen out of the air and liquefy it for use as rocket fuel. However, the Air Force struggled to find a practical use for Dyna-Soar and the ROLS was quickly found to be infeasible using available technology. Furthermore, manned space initiatives were gradually being taken away from the armed forces and consolidated at NASA. These and other factors led to both projects being cancelled in 1963. Meanwhile, NASA’s overriding goal of landing a man on the moon by President John F. Kennedy’s 1970 deadline led them to eschew advanced spaceplane designs in favour of simpler and more well-understood ballistic space capsules.

But while work on what would eventually become the Space Transport System or Space Shuttle would not begin in earnest until the early 1970s, both NASA and the Air Force conducted extensive studies on spaceplane design throughout the 1960s. One of the major design challenges when it came to spaceplanes – as it was for ballistic capsules – was atmospheric reentry. While a spaceplane would require wings in order to glide to a controlled landing, designers feared these structures would not be strong or heat-resistant enough to withstand the stresses of reentry. Furthermore, wings were heavy and would only be required at the end of a mission; it would thus be inefficient to lug them all the way into orbit, cutting into the spacecraft’s payload capacity. One radical solution first proposed by NASA engineer Robert D. Reed, was to eliminate the wings altogether and shape the spacecraft such that its fuselage generated all the lift. Such craft came to be known as lifting bodies – and it is here at last that we come to the main topic of this video.

The idea of using parts of an aircraft other than the wings to generate lift is nothing new; for example, many of the 1930s aircraft designs of Italian-American engineer Giuseppe Ballanca such as the Bellanca Aircruiser featured fuselages and wing struts shaped like airfoils to increase the vehicle’s aerodynamic efficiency. Later aircraft like the 1960s Short SC.7 Skyvan and McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle also use their fuselages to generate significant lift. However, it was not until the 1960s that the technology became available to produce a pure, wingless lifting body aircraft.

In 1962, NASA’s Flight Research Centre – later the Ames-Dryden Flight Research Centre and today the Armstrong Flight Research Centre – approved the construction of a test vehicle to investigate the flight characteristics of lifting body aircraft. Known as the M2-F1 – “M” for “manned” and “F” for “flight” – the vehicle had a tubular steel frame covered in a mahogany shell and was hand-built by engineers and craftsmen from NASA and the Briegleb Glider Company. Much of the woodworking was performed by master craftsmen Gus Briegleb and Ernie Lowder, the latter of whom had previously worked on billionaire Howard Hughes’s gigantic H-4 Hercules all-wood flying boat – AKA the “Spruce Goose.” All told, construction cost a mere $30,000 – largely taken from the research centre’s building maintenance budget. Due to the low-rent nature of the venture, the assembly workshop at El Mirage Airport was nicknamed the “Wright Bicycle Shop” – and to learn more about the amazing story of the real Wright Brothers, please check out our previous video How Did the Wright Brothers Win the Race Into the Air?

Completed in 1963, the M2-F1 looked like something straight out of science fiction – and like nothing even remotely capable of flight. Measuring only 6 metres long and 4 metres wide, it had a rounded, triangular body with a curved belly and flat top, earning it the nickname of “flying bathtub”. Two small vertical fins with rudders on either side of the fuselage provided lateral control, while a set of horizontal elevons controlled the aircraft in pitch and roll. These were actuated manually using conventional pushrod controls, while the fixed landing gear was scavenged from a Cessna 150 light aircraft.

Flight tests took place on the wide expanse of Muroc Dry Lake – today Rogers Dry Lake – in California’s Mojave Desert – home to both the NASA Armstrong Flight Centre and Edwards Air Force Base. At first, the M2-F1was towed along the lakebed behind a 1963 Pontiac Catalina convertible, with test pilot Milt Thompson making the first short hops on April 5, 1963. Unfortunately, the strange aircraft bounced uncontrollably on its landing gear, forcing Thompson to keep the nose down for fear of flipping over. Subsequent tests encountered the same problem, which was eventually traced to unwanted rudder movements. The flight controls were duly modified, and the problem disappeared. However, a new problem had appeared: the tow car was not powerful enough to lift the M2-F1 off the ground. The vehicle was duly hot-rodded to increase its power and fitted with a roll bar and a rearward-facing seat to allow the M2-F1 to be observed in flight. Soon, tow speeds reached 180 kilometres per hour, allowing Thompson to reach altitudes of around 6 metres before cutting the tow line and gliding freely for about 20 seconds. In total, Thompson performed some 400 auto tow flights, gathering valuable data on lifting body aerodynamics and handling characteristics.

On August 16, 1963, Thompson piloted the M2-F1 on its first high-altitude flight, towed behind a Douglas DC-3 transport aircraft. For these tests the “flying bathtub” was fitted with an ejection seat as well as a set of small booster rockets to allow the pilot to increase airspeed extend his landing by a few seconds if needed. One of the major questions which aircraft like the M2-F1 were designed to answer was whether a reentering spaceplane could make a safe landing completely unpowered or whether some kind of auxiliary propulsion – either a rocket or jet engine – was needed. On a typical test flight, the M2-F1 was towed to an altitude of 3,700 metres and released, whereupon it took around two minutes to spiral to the ground. Naturally inefficient as a glider, the aircraft had a terrifying sink rate 66 kilometres per hour and reached maximum speeds of 190 kilometres per hour. In total, the M2-F1 made 77 flights between August 1963 and August 1966, being flown by 10 different test pilots including legends Chuck Yeager and Bill Dana and future NASA astronauts Fred Haise and Joe Engle. Despite a handful of minor mishaps, the aircraft performed well, paving the way for further lifting body research. The pioneering M2-F1 was transferred to the collection of the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., but in 2015 was loaned out to the Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base where she remains on display to this day.

In 1963, as the M2-F1 was nearing completion, NASA contracted the Northrop Corporation – ironically known for their all-wing aircraft designs – to create a more capable advanced lifting body research vehicle, designated the M2-F2. Completed in 1966, the M2-F2, the aircraft was 1 metre narrower than its predecessor but weighed four times as much, being built of aluminium instead of wood. It also featured retractable landing gear for reduced drag and the provision for installing various types of rocket engines. The M2-F2 made its first unmanned captive flight on March 23, 1966, the aircraft being mounted to a pylon under the right wing of a modified Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber. On July 12, it made its first unpowered glide test with Milt Thompson once again at the controls, the aircraft being released from the mothership at an altitude of 12,000 metres and reaching a top speed of 720 kilometres per hour. A further fourteen glide tests were performed without incident. But on the sixteenth, conducted on May 10, 1967, disaster struck. As the M2-F2 approached the runway, test pilot Bruce Peterson experienced a phenomenon known as dutch roll – an uncommanded oscillation in roll and yaw. While Peterson managed to get the aircraft back under control, he became distracted by a nearby helicopter and drifted away from the runway. Finding it difficult to determine his height above the lake bed, Peterson fired his landing rockets to try and gain speed, but it was too late; the M2-F2 slammed into the ground before the landing gear could fully deploy and rolled over six times, coming to a rest upside-down. Miraculously, Peterson survived the impact and eventually made a full recovery, but unfortunately lost his right eye to an infection. It is footage of this dramatic crash which was later used in the opening title sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man.

The instability that triggered the crash was ruled to be pilot induced oscillation or PIO, caused by a lack of adequate lateral control. The M2-F2 was thus rebuilt as the M2-F3, which featured a ventral fin for greater directional stability. The M2-F3 was first flown on June 2, 1970 by test pilot Bill Dana. Two more unpowered glides followed before the aircraft was fitted with a 36 kilonewton thrust Reaction Motors XLR-11 rocket engine. Fuelled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, the engine featured four combustion chambers that could be individually lit to vary the overall thrust. The first powered flight took place November 25, 1970, with Bill Dana once again at the controls. Over the next two years Dana, along with test pilots John Manke, Cecil Powell, and Jerauld Gentry, made 24 powered flights, reaching a maximum altitude of 21,800 metres and a maximum speed of Mach 1.6. It is worth noting here the enormous advancements made in supersonic aerodynamics since Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in level flight on October 14, 1947. His aircraft, the Bell X-1, used the same engine as the M2-F3, yet despite looking far more aerodynamic than NASA’s “flying bathtub”, struggled to exceed Mach 1. In the course of the M2-F3’s research career, test pilots discovered that lifting bodies are inherently unstable and difficult to fly using traditional direct flight controls. Thus, on later flights the aircraft was fitted with a prototype stability augmentation or “fly by wire” system, which used computers to analyze the pilot’s control inputs and translate them into the rapid control surface movements needed to keep the aircraft flying stably. The aircraft was also fitted with an experimental side mounted control column or “side stick”; both technologies are widely used on modern aircraft. Following its retirement in 1972, the M2-F2 was also donated to the National Air & Space Museum and currently hangs in the National Mall building’s Milestones of Flight gallery.

In parallel with the M2-F3, Northrop also built and tested another lifting body demonstrator known as the HL-10 – “HL” standing for Horizontal Lander. Though similar in shape and dimensions to the H2-L1, the HL-10 had an inverted fuselage shape, with a flat bottom and curved top into which the cockpit canopy was faired. The aircraft cost $1.8 million to build, and to save money many parts were scavenged from other aircraft, such as landing gear from a Northrop T-38 Talon supersonic trainer and an ejection seat from a Convair F-106 Delta Dart interceptor.

The HL-10 was completed in January 1966 and made its first unpowered flight on December 22, piloted by Bruce Peterson – who the following year would crash spectacularly in the H2-F2. Shortly thereafter, the aircraft was fitted with an XLR-11 rocket engine, though the next 11 drops were flown unpowered to evaluate the aircraft’s handling characteristics. The first powered flight took place on October 23, 1968 with Jerauld Gentry at the controls, though the engine suffered a malfunction and Gentry was forced to land only three minutes after launch. On the next flight, on November 13, 1968, John Manke tried three times unsuccessfully to light the engine, while on the flight after that Gentry finally succeeded in making a full powered flight. The aircraft made a further 12 successful powered flights, reaching a maximum altitude of 27,440 metres and a maximum speed of Mach 1.86. On later flights, pilots made high speed approaches from high altitudes to study proposed landing profiles for space planes reentering the atmosphere – flights which involved landing at speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour. As with the H2-H2, three Bell 500 pound thrust hydrogen peroxide booster rockets were fitted to provide extra thrust during landing if needed and determine whether such boosting would be needed on future space planes. The data collected during these flights would later prove invaluable to the design of the Space Shuttle. The HL-10 is currently on display at Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base, along with the M2-H1.

But Northrop was not the only name in the lifting body game. In 1963, the United States Air Force contracted the Martin Marietta Corporation to design a number of lifting body demonstrators for spaceplane reentry research. The first of these, designated the SV-5D and later the X-23A PRIME for Precision Reentry Including Maneuvering reEntry (don’t you love a good forced acronym?), were small 2 metre long by 1.2 metre wide unmanned vehicles designed to be launched into space atop a Convair SM-65 Atlas ballistic missile. The vehicles were constructed from titanium, stainless steel, aluminium, and beryllium, coated in ablative heat shield material, and fitted with a nitrogen gas control system to allow them to perform maneuvers while reentering the atmosphere. Once the vehicles reached an altitude of 30 kilometres, they deployed a recovery parachute and were “snatched” in midair using a modified Lockheed JC-130B Hercules aircraft in a similar manner to the film canisters from Corona reconnaissance satellites – and for more on another batshit crazy Cold War system used to snatch people into the air, please check out our previous video The Real Story of Capturing an Ice Fortress with a Badass James Bond Film Device. Three X-23A missions were launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on December 2, 1966, March 5, 1967, and April 19, 1967, but various technical failures caused the first two vehicles to sink into the Pacific Ocean before they could be recovered. However, the third mission was a complete success and the recovered X-23A is now on display at the Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

Meanwhile, Martin built a piloted lifting body demonstrator called the SV-5P – later renamed the X-24A. Similar in design to the Northrop HL-10 though slightly larger, the X-24A had a flat bottom and curved top surface, was powered by an XLR-11 rocket engine, and fitted with two Bell solid propellant rocket motors for landing. Like the previous Northrop lifting body aircraft, it was also launched from a modified B-52 bomber. The X-24A made its first unpowered gliding flight on April 17, 1969 and its first powered flight on March 19, 1970, piloted both times by Jerauld Gentry. In total, the aircraft flew 29 times, reaching a maximum altitude of 21,800 metres and a maximum speed of Mach 1.52. In the early 1970s, the aircraft was rebuilt into a radically different flat wedge shape dubbed the “flying flatiron”, which first flew unpowered on August 1, 1973 with John Manke at the controls. The aircraft was flown 36 times before being retired on November 26, 1975, reaching a maximum speed of Mach 1.76 and successfully demonstrating that a reentering spaceplane could safely make a precision gliding landing without any additional thrust being required.

In the mid-1970s, various proposals were floated for an X-24C variant that would use supersonic combustion ramjet or scramjet engines to reach hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 8, but nothing came of these plans. Martin also built a pair of jet-powered versions of the X-24A called the SV-57 for pilot training purposes; however, they were unable to convince any test pilots to fly the aircraft, and they were never used. Also unrealized were plans to turn the Northrop HL-10 into the world’s first operational space plane by fitting it with a heat shield and reaction control system. Taking advantage of the large amounts of hardware left over from the Apollo moon landing programme, the proposed mission profile called for the HL-10 to be launched into earth orbit by a giant Saturn V rocket, mounted in the space usually reserved for the Lunar Module or LM. The crew would ride separately aboard a Apollo Command-Service Module or CSM as per usual. Once in orbit, a robotic arm would extract the spaceplane from its adaptor and bring it alongside the CSM, allowing the pilot to spacewalk over, power up the vehicle, and fly it back down to earth. However, the head of the NASA Flight Research Centre saw the scheme as an inefficient and expensive use of resources, and along with nearly all proposed post-Apollo missions, it was never flown.

And while the M2-F2, HL-10 and X-24 programmes gathered valuable data on lifting body aerodynamics, fly-by-wire control systems, and unpowered reentry profiles, in the end NASA opted not to use a lifting body design for the Space Transport System AKA the Space Shuttle. The main issue was with propellant storage; for the shuttle, NASA selected a combination of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, which must be stored in cylindrical pressure vessels. Such vessels are difficult to fit into the complexly-curved shape of a lifting body aircraft without creating a great deal of wasted space. Furthermore, lifting bodies have very small glide ratios descend at extremely high speeds, giving them a very restricted landing envelope and requiring very long runways. However, NASA wanted the shuttle to be able to land at a variety of alternate runways in case of poor weather at the primary landing site. As a result, the Space Shuttle was designed with a more conventional delta-winged configuration. This proved a fateful decision, as NASA was to learn during the STS-107 mission of the space shuttle Columbia. When the shuttle launched into orbit on January 16, 2003, a piece of insulating foam broke off the external propellant tank, striking the left wing and damaging the reinforced carbon-carbon composite leading edge. When the shuttle reentered the atmosphere two weeks later on February 1, hot plasma entered the breach and caused the shuttle to disintegrate in midair, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Had the shuttle used a lifting body design, such vulnerable edges would have been minimized and the vehicle may have survived reentry.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was also pursuing its own spaceplane project, even more advanced and ambitious than American efforts. In 1960, the OKB-155 design bureau under famous Soviet aircraft designer Artem Mikoyan – the “M” in MiG – began working on a concept known as the Spiral OS, composed of three main components: a reusable GSR delta-winged, ramjet-powered supersonic launch aircraft; an RB two-stage rocket booster; and an OS orbiter. The GSR would boost the OS-RB combination to a speed of Mach 6 at an altitude of 30 kilometres, whereupon the RB would ignite and insert the OS into an initial 130 kilometre orbit. As this orbit could only be sustained for a short time before atmospheric drag caused it to decay, the OS would then fire its own engines to gain altitude. Meanwhile, the GSR mothership would return to base, ready to be used for another launch.

The design of the OS spaceplane itself was highly innovative, featuring variable dihedral wings. During reentry, these would be folded vertically to place them in the “shadow” of the heat shield and protect them from damage. During this phase, the specially-shaped fuselage would generate the required lift in the same manner as the American lifting-body proposals. Once the vehicle reached a safe speed, the wings would fold down horizontally, allowing the aircraft to land on a conventional runway. To increase landing range and provide capability for emergency go-around, a small turbojet engine was also fitted. Interestingly, the American Space Shuttle was originally supposed to feature such engines, but these were ultimately deleted to save weight. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Spiral OS was its turned-up nose, designed to reduce heating of the rear fuselage during reentry. This earned the vehicle the nickname Lapot – a traditional blunt-ended peasant’s shoe made of woven tree bark. To avoid cutting holes in the heat shield, the landing gear – comprising four metal skids – was stored in the upper, unshielded section of the spacecraft and folded down just before landing. Finally, in case of an emergency, the pilot could detach the entire cockpit from the spaceplane, which served as a miniature reentry capsule complete with heat shield.

These design features, along with the spacecraft’s unique launch profile, would have given the Spiral OS numerous advantages over the later NASA space shuttle. For instance, the folding wings, landing engine, unbroken heat shield, and pilot escape capsule would have made the spacecraft far safer and robust than the STS orbiter, likely allowing the crew to survive a Columbia-style reentry incident. Furthermore, the reusable aircraft launch system would have allowed the Spiral to reach any orbital inclination, carry two or three times the payload of a conventional launch vehicle of the same mass, and reduced the cost per launch by up to threefold.

The test project was to be divided into three phases. The first would involve unmanned models launched into space atop rockets in the same manner as the American X-23 PRIME. The second phase would involve the construction of a manned, jet-powered vehicle dropped from a modified Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” strategic bomber to test subsonic handling. This vehicle would later be fitted with rocket engines, allowing it to reach speeds of up to Mach 8. Finally, phase 3 would involve launching a manned, sub-scale spaceplane into orbit using a conventional Soyuz launch vehicle to prove out the vehicle’s systems and reentry capability. Interestingly, Soviet engineers initially had difficulty combining the Soyuz rocket with the Spiral, whose highly-asymmetric weight distribution tended to unbalance the launch vehicle. It was thus suggested that the spacecraft be towed into orbit behind the rocket. As the spacecraft was already designed to withstand the heat of atmospheric reentry, it could easily survive the rocket’s exhaust, meaning this idea was not as crazy as it sounds. Ultimately, however, engineers figured out how to fit the spaceplane atop the rocket.

But while official approval to build the Spiral OS was given in 1966 and a group of cosmonaut test pilots chosen the year before, enthusiasm for the project was hard to maintain among the upper echelons of the Soviet government, and following the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, the project was cancelled before much hardware had been completed.

However, in 1974 the Spiral project was suddenly restarted in response to the American Space Shuttle program. Amusingly, the Space Shuttle greatly concerned the Soviets, who believed it could snatch their satellites out of orbit and return them to the United States for study. Spoiler alert: it could not. To collect subsonic atmospheric handling data for the new project, now designated the Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft or EPOS, the Mikoyan design bureau constructed a small, jet-powered version of the “Lapot” design known as the MiG-105. The aircraft made its first powered flight on October 11, 1976, and was first dropped from a Tu-95 mothership on November 27, 1977. In total, the MiG-105 made eight test flights with test pilot A.G. Festovets at the controls, until a hard landing in September 1978 resulted in the aircraft being written off and retired. Nonetheless, the test programme demonstrated the fundamental soundness of the design – including the variable-dihedral wings. Meanwhile, a series of small unmanned models were built to test heat shield materials and reentry manoeuvring. Known as Bespilotnyi Orbital’nyi Raketoplan or “Unpiloted Orbital Rocketplanes” – BOR for short – the models were launched into space from the Kapustin Yar complex in Astrakhan Oblast, Russia, atop Kosmos-3M rockets before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean, where they were recovered by Soviet Navy Vessels. Six different BOR models were built, with fifteen confirmed launches being conducted between 1969 and 1988.

By this time, however, the Spiral concept had been abandoned in favour of the Buran spacecraft, which externally appeared very similar to the NASA Space Shuttle. But once again the Soviet design was in many ways superior to its American counterpart. For instance, while the Space Shuttle carried its own hydrogen-oxygen rocket engines, the propellant being supplied from a large external tank, Buran was strapped to the side of standalone liquid-fuelled Energia super-heavy booster, eliminating the weight of onboard engines and allowing the orbiter to carry a larger payload. This configuration also eliminated the need for the dangerous and un-extinguishable solid rocket boosters or SRBs which triggered the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.

Buran made its first – and only – unmanned flight on November 15, 1988, lifting off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, completing two orbits of the earth, and landing automatically on the runway back at Baikonur. A second unmanned flight was planned for sometime in 1993, but the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in the project’s cancellation. The prototype was placed in storage, only to be destroyed in 2002 when its hangar collapsed.

But while the 1960s dream of sleek, lifting body spaceplanes never came to fruition, the concept may be poised to making something of a comeback, with several proposed spacecraft concepts in recent years using elements of the lifting body design. These include the RSC Energia Kliper, the Orbital Sciences Corporation Prometheus, the Sierra Nevada Corporation Dream Chaser Space System, the ESA Hermes, the NASA HL-20 Personnel Launch System, the NASA/Scaled Composites X-38 Crew Return Vehicle, and the Lockheed Martin Venturestar. The latter concept is particularly ambitious, designed to combine single-stage-to-orbit or SSTO and horizontal landing capability – the holy grail of reusable spacecraft design. Due to budget cuts, technical failures, and other factors, nearly all of these projects were eventually cancelled, with only the Dream Chaser currently in active development. But the trials and tribulations of these modern projects are an enormous subject for a separate video; for now, while the future of the lifting body spacecraft seems uncertain, at least the experiments of the 1960s, 70s, 80s have shown the concept to be perfectly feasible. In other words: we can built it – we have the technology!

The post Look, Ma: no Wings! The Strange World of Lifting Body Aircraft appeared first on Today I Found Out.

A relatively common trope today is that of the noble and honorable Samurai warrior opposed by their shadowy brother from another mother, the mystical and morally corrupt, black garbed assassin warrior known as the ninja.

These fabled shadow warriors of Japanese history have been a staple of modern pop culture since around the 1960s when super-spy James Bond encountered them on a trip to Japan in You Only Live Twice. Prior to this, ninjas were something few people outside of their homeland were aware of. This has contributed to the real-world history of the ninja and their origins being rather chock full of admittedly awesome myths and legends, all surrounding them like a thick, shadowy fog.

Something we feel the ninjas of history would feel proud of. Afterall, hiding and remaining unseen is sort of their whole deal… And, indeed, even in their time, they seemed to like to play up some of the stories that arose around what they were capable of and how they did what they did.

This all brings us to the topic of today- just who were the ninja and what did they actually get up to in reality?

To begin with, in a nutshell the ninja were elite, mercenary spies that also doubled as a type of swiss army knife of special forces, skilled in everything from sabotage, espionage, ambush, arson, assasination, to there is even evidence that they were highly trained in first aid and use of various medicines.

As historian Yamada Yüji notes, “You need to know the topography of the enemy’s position, the condition of his food supplies, the structure of his castle. It was the job of the shinobi [ninja] to obtain this kind of crucial information. They would infiltrate the enemy domain and ascertain the lay of the land…and create chaos through acts of sabotage and arson.”

On that note, debunking our first ninja myth, there’s no historical record of them dressing in the stereotypical ninja outfits we all know and love today. Because the thing was, wearing such garb would be one heck of a way for them to stand out in many types of missions.

As such, ninjas mostly seem to have worn the garb of everything from monk to farmer to servant- whatever a particular mission required, rather than any set uniform.

We’ll have some examples of them doing just this later on, but for now, ninjas so commonly wearing the clothing of farmers and the like even gave rise to the idea for a time that they were mostly simple farmers who simply took money for spying. While there certainly were individuals who did just that, when talking actual ninjas as we think of them, they were anything but simple, and there are even nobles who were samurai who are known to have been trained up in ninjitsu. More on this later.

But for now, let’s look at the origin of the ninja.

As you might expect, as in pretty much every other group since humans have been humaning, spies in some form have seemingly always existed. So pinpointing when exactly the ninja got their start isn’t fully clear, and this general timespan with which they popped up depends on how you choose to define them.

For example, if you choose to define the Japanese “ninja” as a person who eschews the usual “accepted” rules of engagement and employs subterfuge and guile in their information gathering and the like, ninja have been around as long as people have been living in Japan.

As for the name, that doesn’t really help out either and was around long before what most today would consider ninja. And for reference here, the more common name for ninja in Japan, shinobi, or shinobi no mono, simply roughly means “spy”, with a more literal translation being either “those who act in stealth” or “a person of stealth” or more aptly “sneaky person”.

As for the term ninja, this is just a different way to pronounce the Kanji characters here, though note, doesn’t appear to have been common until much more recently in history, particularly catching on in the Western world in the 20th century as the preferred name for this group.

But going back to ninja history “they’ve always sort of been around” is admittedly not all that satisfying an answer, which is presumably why Japanese folklore credits legendary hero Yamato Takeru as being, if not the first ninja, the alleged first figure in Japanese mythological history to ignore the traditional “rules” of combat to defeat their foes. In essence, becoming the first ninja if not literally, then spiritually.

Now, we’ll get into the better documented, less mythologized origins in a second, but for now, according to this legend, Yamato Takero was born a prince of the Yamato Kingdom sometime in the first century and spent the bulk of his life being a badass who repeatedly defied seemingly impossible odds time and time again using his peerless intellect and boundless creativity.

For example, one of the most popular legends about the wily prince, and the one that has him being singled out as either the first ninja or at least the folkloric origins of the term, is when he was tasked with putting down a rebellion. The prince, who at this point in the tale was known by his birthname, Wo-Usu, opted not to challenge the rebel leader directly, but instead donned the traditional garb of a shrine maiden and simply walked into his camp. This disguise is said to have worked flawlessly, in part because the prince was known to possess delicate, feminine features and also because he immediately set about getting the rebel leader drunk.

When the rebel leader was suitably soused, the prince revealed the deception and stabbed him to death with a concealed sword, with the rebel leader being said to have used his last ounce of strength to compliment the prince on the balls it took to strike him down at his literal seat of power. In addition to helping quell the rebellion, the act earned the prince the title of Yamato Takeru, which roughly translates to The Brave of Yamato.

For anybody daring to question the validity of any of this, you should first know that on his way home from stabbing the rebel leader to death in his own home, Yamato Takeru challenged and subsequently kicked the crap out of a handful of gods who opposed his father’s rule, as you do.

On top of that, at some point the prince also obtained the Kusanagi, a fabled weapon of Japanese history said to have been personally wielded by the sun goddess Amaterasu before falling into mortal hands. Not that the prince needed it, as the Brave of Yamato personally slayed countless foes with nothing but his wits. Though we imagine it was handy for lopping off god heads.

Proving once and for all that he really did these things and was the first ninja. I mean, how else do you think all those gods died off, hmmmm? Do you see any of those gods alive today?

Checkmate Yamato doubters.

As for his many exploits and growing confidence to be able to do anything, this eventually proved to be the cunning prince’s downfall when he was tasked with felling a mighty mountain god.

In this one, the prince was so supremely confident in his abilities that upon being given the task of killing this god, he boasted “As for the deity of this mountain, I will simply take him empty-handed.”

The god, offended by this boast, decided to take a leaf out of the prince’s book and confronted him on his journey up the mountain in the form of either a boar or snake and attacked him while his back was turned.

The duplicitous deity defeated the hero prince and because of his many sneaky exploits, today the legend of Yamato Takeru is now intrinsically linked with the mythological origins of ninja.

As for the actual history and origin of the ninja, for those who dare doubt the greatness of Yamato, schools for this backroom fighting using guerilla tactics have been around in Japan since at least the 12th century, with one of the earliest such started by a samurai by the name of Daisuke Togakure and a Chinese warrior-monk by the name of Kain Doshi… which if that isn’t a pairing made for Hollywood or a pretty kick-butt adventure game or novel, I don’t know what is.

But the product of these two’s work together was what is sometimes considered the first ninjitsu school. Although it should be noted that there is some contention over the historical accuracy of many elements of this origin story.

Moving on from there, the art of ninjitsu really seemed to ramp up in the ballpark of the 15th century, during the rather chaotic, war filled Sengoku Period, at least as far as being when the ninjas as we’d understand them today began to emerge and ply their shadowy trade for fun and profit en masse.

However, again, for centuries prior throughout Japan, feudal warlords and and their ilk would employ various asymmetric warfare tactics, or if we want to use the scientific term- “dick moves”, like burning down a rival’s castle or assassinating members of their leadership hierarchy when it suited them.

Further, such tactics aren’t unique to Japanese history, with militaries throughout all of human history making use of them. There is literally an entire chapter of The Art of War, written in the 5th century BCE, dedicated to setting the enemy on fire that not only encourages you to do so whenever possible, but to take advantage of the chaos it causes by stealing their stuff or attacking them as they try to put it out.

However, why the Sengoku Period is generally pointed to for the ninjas origins is that it was around this time that specific schools to train up such individuals started popping up around Japan, with the most famous and most skilled coming from the regions of Iga and Koka, though note, contrary to what is sometimes said, these were not the only places individuals wanting to become ninjas could be trained in Japan, just allegedly these two groups were the best.

For whatever reason, the clans here simply took the idea of such a special operations warrior spy and ran with it, becoming highly sought after for their prodigious skills. In fact, so associated with the craft were these regions that at a certain point, Iga-mono actually became a euphemism for “spy”.

As for potential factors that went into cultivating these talents, Iga and Koka were seen as being of little geographic, political or military importance by warring feudal lords during the Sengoku period and the years leading up to it, so the people there were largely left to do their own thing.

However, that’s not to say they didn’t have to defend themselves from time to time, and given their relative inability to do so with a grand army or any such if attacked, it’s speculated left the peoples of these two regions much more willing to think outside the box, throwing out many of the established honorable “rules” of war. Sure, poisoning the enemy commanders or sneaking in and burning buildings down with they or their warriors inside may not have been the honorable way to do battle, but it was a way that a handful of people could get the job done against a potentially vastly superior force.

Thus, in the end these so-called peasant-warriors banded together and came up with some rather ingenious ways to keep from being conquered, ultimately creating family clans that specialized in this art form, with, in turn, their remote location thought to have helped in maintaining secrecy on their training and how they went about doing what they did. Going further, by the mid-16th century, the Iga and Koka also formed an alliance and began working together.

Or to quote Yuji Yamada, the vice-president of the International Ninja Research Center, which my school counselor definitely should have told me was a job option,

“Iga farmers might have joined forces with local outlaw groups to fight for their sovereignty.”

Being humble farmers without access to military training or weaponry, the people of Iga and Koka instead took to weaponising whatever they had to hand. For example the kama, a small cutting tool not dissimilar from a sickle, is closely associated with ninjas, but sources suggest Iga and Koka villagers weren’t above using stuff as simple as a kitchen knife to defend themselves. Over time, and as the reputation of each village grew, and they began to train and arm themselves not out of necessity, but deliberately, such weapons and tactics weren’t abandoned. Simply refined.

Appropriately, the training, techniques and history of these proto-ninja were shrouded in secrecy and even today, we know precious little about any of it, with most information we do have been gleaned from three secret surviving ninja scrolls.

Which yes, are a thing.

As an aside, the aforementioned Yuji Yamada actually studies and teaches classes on these “ninjitsu manuals” meaning he’s technically a Professor of Ninja Studies.

Seriously, come on guidance counselors. Up your game! It was right there!!!!

And on that note, yes, it is possible to get a degree in Ninja-ology, with Yamada being one of the people who teaches that course at Mie University.

Sadly, something worth mentioning is that while a lot of sites reported on the course as being one you can take to “officially” be recognised as a ninja, Yamada has stressed in interviews on what exactly the course entails, that this is not the case. He states,“This is a course to learn about the ninja, not to become one.”

But in any event, at the same time the Iga and Koka were refining the art of ninjitsu, feudal lords of Japan fully realised how useful a skillset this was, and at some point realized the people of Iga and Koka were particularly exceptional at this style of warfare and began more or less proclaiming on high to these clans “Shut up and take my money.”

Moving on from there, contrary to popular belief, ninjitsu is not a martial art and any person claiming to teach it as such is likely in desperate need of a powerful laxative, owing to being full of crap.

That’s not to say ninja weren’t trained up in various fighting skills, just there’s no record of incorporating any specific rigid fighting style, and in fact of the three surviving texts outlining their training and the equipment they used, they do not mention fighting without a weapon even once. Instead, they were simply trained in use of a myriad of weapons, contraptions, and the like that could be helpful over the course of their duties.

As the Igaryu Ninja Museum sum up –

“A person who uses Ninjutsu is a ninja. Ninjutsu is not a martial art. Ninjutsu is an independent art of warfare that developed mainly in the regions of Iga in Mie Prefecture, and Koka in Shiga Prefecture, Japan.”

So, let us now look at some of the specific activities of these ninja mercenaries. Leading off with their propensity to burn things to the ground, in 1541 we have a combined force of Iga and Koka clan ninjas doing exactly that, as recorded in a 16th century diary, “This morning…, the Iga-shu entered Kasagi castle in secret and set fire to a few of the priests’ quarters. They also set fire to outbuildings in various places inside the San-no-maru. They captured the ichi-no-maru (inner bailey) and the ni-no-maru (second bailey).”

17 years later a group of 48 ninja burned the Sawayama Castle via first stealing a lantern bearing the family’s crest, at which point they then made replicas of that lantern. They then dressed as samurai and with the lanterns bearing the appropriate crest in hand, managed to get into the castle, at which point they set it on fire.

The stories of their abilities at burning things to the ground are both frequent and one of the few things they got up to that are relatively easy to see in documented history, or at least when it involved things like burning castles.

Getting back to the training of ninjas, the ninjitsu manuals mentioned previously seem to indicate that ninjas from the Iga and Koka clans adhered to an “all’s fair in love and war” philosophy. For example, a less-than-savory tip given to ninjas tasked with reconnaissance of a fortified position was to find a dead body, or, you know, make one… cut it open and then check the contents of the stomach. If the stomach contains meat and vegetables, it’s a good sign the location is well supplied. If it only contained staples such as rice or even no food at all, that’s a good indication those inside aren’t eating well- a rather valuable piece of information in a siege, for example.

Speaking of food, the manuals also include advice on avoiding food that would cause body odour and instead stick to hearty, simple staples. Nestled in there is also advice on portable foodstuffs for the ninja on the go.

For the curious, to stave off hunger, ninjas would mix “carrots, buckwheat flour, wheat flour, yam, licorice root, and rice flour which was steeped in sake for three years”.
Yes, three years.
This calorie-dense mixture was shaped into small balls and then dried out. The result was a so-called “hunger-ball” the size of a peach pit a ninja could carry on their person and use to satisfy their hunger in a pinch.

…Or possibly a practical joke played on us all by the ninjas, no doubt laughing their butts off thinking how later peoples would spend three years making this and then tasting the revolting results.

On that note, according to Max Miller of the phenomenal channel Tasting History, which fun fact is one of the only history channels I watch because, you know, I do this all day, so in my offtime watching other similar channels would be more like work… But Tasting History? Max Miller? Chef’s kiss… and a different angle on it all in focussing on cuisine.

But in any event, Mr. Miller spent three years making and then tasted these food balls and notes they are, in fact, disgusting.

Or to quote him directly, “It says to have three of these to stave off hunger, but maybe if you have three of these you just don’t want to eat anymore… Utter disappointment… It’s so bitter. They’re terrible. Absolutely terrible. The texture’s terrible. The flavor is terrible… Ya, 1 out of 10.”

I have literally never seen him more disgusted while chewing in any of his phenomenal videos.

In any event, the ninja also made a concoction of “crushed plum pulp, put with rye ergot (a fungus that grew on grass) and crystallized sugar”. The mixture would again be dried and formed into a ball that the ninja could carry on their person.

As for moving around, the ninja manuals detail numerous techniques for stealth as well as tips on conditioning. Some of these would seem intuitive, like walking on your tip toes to avoid noise, but the manuals stress drilling these movements until they are not just second nature, but something a ninja can do without exertion, particularly useful for avoiding heavy breathing.

On that note, the manuals also contain advice on breathing, as well as how to make footwear that’s particularly good for stealth, essentially just by attaching layers of cotton to the underside of sandals, as well as how to make things like makibishi, or caltrops, from commonly available materials like bamboo to help slow down pursuers. The scrolls even include tips on how to keep dogs from barking, as well as the best method of defending yourself if attacked by multiple people at once. If you’re curious on this one, they recommend focusing on attacking to your right, as well as throwing special powders the ninja would make into the eyes of your opponents, so you can use that great cardio training and stealth to get away.

This advice dovetails into information about conditioning which tells aspiring ninja to endlessly hone their bodies, encouraging the repetition of movements that would strengthen the body as well as practising things like climbing, running and swimming.

A speedy and quiet ninja is an alive ninja, after all.

There are also entire sections on both disguise and infiltration, which brings us back around to their garb. No mention here of ninjas seeming to have dressed in all black outfits with a cool, face-obscuring mask.

That would just be a great way to stand out and eventually identify that you were a ninja, which being identified as such was the last thing any ninja on a mission would want to have happen.

Instead, as mentioned, ninjas wore things like the traditional garb of a peasant farmer in their day-to-day life, or otherwise adopting similar disguises as necessary to infiltrate or blend in, everything from samurai to monk to traveling musician, with it being noted that, in order to disguise themselves as the latter, some ninjas would even learn how to play traditional instruments to an acceptable level to sell the ruse that they were just a simple traveling bard.

Ninjas were committed to the bit, essentially.

In the event they didn’t need to hide in plain sight and instead sneak into a place without being seen at all, it’s speculated they’d likely have worn dark blue rather than black, given black tends to stand out against the dark of night better, whereas dark blue typically blends exceptionally well.

Likewise it’s speculated that the outfits worn during such endeavors would also have been extremely baggy so as to disguise a ninja’s silhouette as much as possible, not dissimilar from a modern ghillie suit used by many militaries around the globe.

The folds of such an outfit could also be used to hide a great deal of weapons and tools necessary for the ninja’s mission.

Although, whether that’s actually what they wore when sneaking about at night or not, the ninja scrolls do recommend only bringing what you absolutely needed for a given mission so as not to get slowed down by carrying too much.

As to where the idea of them wearing the more stereotypical black, masked outfits today came from, this appears to have first popped up in Edo theater, with such entertainment also seeming to be where the idea that the ninjas were sort of the magical, dishonorable counterparts to the honorable samurai was likewise proliferated.

Despite the fact that, as mentioned, there are several known instances of individuals who were samurai, who were also trained up as highly skilled ninja as well. The two were not mutually exclusive- ninjitsu just being a skillset anyone could acquire with training, and a rather useful one for a warrior. These skills then tended to be passed down within families.

Let’s now jump back to their skills beyond stealth, with the various ninja groups developing a truly staggering amount of ways to ruin someone’s day.

As for weapons, they were once again trained in everything from knives, shears, farm implements, to even simple nails to do their deadly work. In fact, their seeming preference to train up in using weapons derived from farm implements is speculated to have also helped them pass as farmers carrying tools of their trade… that just so happened to also be capable of being used as a deadly weapon if one needed.

They also seem to have created a number of custom weapons for various purposes, though in some cases it isn’t actually clear whether they invented something, or simply found specific things useful for their work. This includes things like metal offcuts in the so-called Ninja Star, which made for a great small makeshift dagger of sorts in close quarters, while also could be thrown at opponents in a pinch. Noteworthy, actual evidence of their use, as in so much with ninjas, is hard to come by, given how secretive the groups were with regards to their craft.

Likewise, we have the ninjato sword, commonly wielded by ninjas in pop culture including perhaps the most famous ninja of all, Leonardo of the Ninja Turtles. Legend posits that the sword was created by ninjas to serve as an alternative to a katana and that its design reflects the ninja’s more direct, and quick fighting style, as well as its shorter size better suited for close quarters than a katana, and the straight edge also being better for stabbing.

They also allegedly used a variety of devices to deliver poisons, everything from blowguns to hollowed out eggshells filled with such substances, designed to be thrown directly into the face of opponents.

On top of this, there are references to various bits of everything from custom climbing equipment to even tiny collapsable boats and similar small collapsable ladders that they allegedly used. They also seemed to have been trained extensively in lock picking. The list goes on and on. Essentially, would a skill or tool be useful in infiltrating enemy camps or locations? Well, they probably had something for that.

And, of course, ninjas were masters of fire. This fact, along with their ability to seemingly just up and disappear, seems to have lent some credence among the masses to the ninja’s mystical abilities, when, in fact, they just developed a number of devices that utilized gunpowder, and were really quiet and quick.

On this note, what is generally well known is that rudimentary firearms were first introduced to Japan in the late mid 1500s by the Portuguese. What’s less well known is that the ability to make gunpowder was already known in the region, with the recipe said to have been gleaned from information learned from Chinese immigrants to Japan over the previous few centuries. While not widely used across Japan, at some point the villages of Iga and Koka not only became adept at the creation of a very rudimentary version of gunpowder, but were endlessly creative in utilising it.

This led to the creation of things like primitive flamethrowers, bottle rockets that could be used to send messages or alert people to their presence, small firecrackers that could distract or otherwise confuse an opponent, to even hand held grenades, with some designs for various gunpowder laden contraptions even appearing in the aforementioned ninja scrolls.

And just for fun, the show Ninja Truth, which had Mr. Ninja Professor himself, Yuji Yamada, in as an expert, decided to test some of these things using period appropriate tools and materials.

Perhaps the most impressive device uncovered by the team was a small gun that could be concealed inside of a dagger-like holster. Essentially, the ninjas had made a gun knife.

Which is incredibly ninja because, as everybody knows, nobody expects a gun knife.

Of course, the show was careful to clarify that even with historical documents, little discussed in the episode could be taken as gospel. In part because the documents, even being hundreds of years old, themselves are likely based on oral recollections, with things modified over time.

In the end, ninjas and their clans just kept an incredible amount secret while plying their trade, keenly aware that the less people knew about them and how they did what they did, the better they’d be able to leverage their reputation, and the more they could charge for their services, given the skills and devices they had that few others did.

In short, when it comes to ninjas, basically nothing can be taken as gospel.

As for what happened to the ninja, well, as the centuries rolled on, while warriors and spies continued to exist, the likes of the specialized classes of ninjas and Samurai went the way of the dodo.

That said, as they faded into history, their legends only grew in theater and other forms of entertainment- something that has continued to this day. This has given rise to a number of myths about both groups, though with arguably the myths about ninjas being far more outlandish, primarily owing to that so much of what they did was done in secret.

But bottom line, the more less perfected ninja were mostly just incredibly well trained spies and special forces operatives, many of whom hired out their services to various warring groups who needed a castle burned, intel from the inside of their enemy camps, or the like, with these skills still common among certain professions to this day, if perhaps the means in which the people get the job done may have changed over the years- from dressing as monks to infiltrate a castle, to wearing a suit and tie and bearing credentials of an academic at an educational symposium.

Which by the way, if you watch our video on what it’s actually like to be a spy in modern times, this is one of the top ways the various spy organizations the world over today recruit spies from other nations, with apparently many an educational symposium even secretly put on by entities like the CIA themselves in order to target specific PhDs, engineers, and the like they’d like to get their meathooks in.

In short, want a specific individual to be recruited as a spy who’s an expert in a certain branch of nuclear physics and working for your enemies’ program you’d like more information on? Well, fund an awesome symposium somewhere tropical that’s centered around their exact area of expertise and then make sure they get an invitation, maybe even all expenses paid if they’re willing to come present their latest paper at it. Then, you know, while they’re there, have one of your agents smooze them up, and ultimately offer them a deal if they seem like they might be open to it.

The post What Was Being a Ninja Really Like? appeared first on Today I Found Out.

“We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.”

These are the words of famed master of the pen, Oscar Wilde, in his Ballad of Reading Gaol, referencing his time spent at Pentonville Prison for, ironically, mastering working with a different type of pen…

As a brief aside, while many lament the initial thing that set forth a chain of events that saw Wilde imprisoned today, specifically his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, very surprisingly, unlike with the likes of the great Alan Turing and countless thousands others who were unjustly punished for their sexuality, it turns out there is a LOT more to the story of Wilde’s conviction that many a biographer skirts over, though to be fair this is in part because some elements of the original transcript from the original trial were only discovered in the year 2000. Reading through those, however, even in modern times and through a modern lens and sensibilities, Wilde would have almost certainly found himself behind bars, disgraced, and absolutely vilified pretty well universally on the interwebs.

But we’re not here to discuss Oscar Wilde, the full story of his conviction was simply a rabbit hole we were previously woefully ignorant of, and will share more on later in the Bonus Facts if you’re interested as well- though fair warning, it’s quite dark and, oof. Never look too deeply into your heroes, especially when they are from the past, which was of course, the worst.

But in any event, embedded in Wilde’s aforementioned poem, he references sweating on the mill. This was a device created by famed engineer Sir William Cubitt in the early days of Cubitt’s career, with the primary purpose of the surprisingly feature rich machine being both to punish prisoners in an excruciating way for upwards of 10 hours per day, while also isolating them in that task so that they could properly think about what they’d done wrong.

While Wilde may have abhorred the machine, having been forced to march on it for a couple years, another famous master wordsmith, Charles Dickens, would praise it, writing, “It is a satisfaction to me to see that determined thief, swindler, or vagrant sweating profusely at the treadmill… [knowing] he is doing nothing all the time but undergoing punishment.”

Here now is the story of when humans first started exercising for fitness’ sake, as well as the rather torturous invention of the treadmill, which saw prison death rates ramp up considerably once implemented, but paradoxically also seemed to be a major health boon to those that survived their monotonous march.

Contrary to what you might think, as long as humans have been humaning in a documented way, it would appear we have been deliberately exercising for the sake of health and fitness. From the Ancient Egyptians, who not only had forms of fitness training, but even acrobatic based sports they trained for, to the much more famous Ancient Greeks athletes, a subset of whom regularly trained for things like the Olympic Games, with some frankly incredible results.

For example, one of their favorite forms of exercise seems to have involved lifting and sometimes throwing stones of various sizes. If you’re wondering here, the Ancient Greek record for heaviest stone used in stone throwing, or at least as far as we are aware today, was a 316 lb or 143.5 kg stone found in Olympia, Greece. Based on an inscription on the stone, this was successfully thrown one handed, over his head by an apparently beast of a man named Bybon.

In another case, there is a surviving stone weighing 1058 lbs or 480 kg that has inscribed “Eumastas, the son of Critobulus, lifted me from the ground.” Note here, that’s only 6% under the current world record for deadlifting.

Beyond training for various sporting events, and seemingly just for physique in some cases, similar to modern humans, soldiers also commonly trained via doing things like digging, chopping wood, as well as used various weighted devices, for example training with practice weapons and armor that were significantly heavier than the real thing.

Through medieval times to the modern day, similar stone throwing and picking up, and military training exercises remained common.

Training for women throughout history tended to be similar, just generally geared towards lighter weights and focussing more on agility and speed, not too dissimilar to many today. However, it should be noted in modern times the science has shown pretty clearly that women should actually be training more or less exactly like men train with some cardio, which many women do a ton of, but also heavily focussing on low rep, heavy weights and big compound movements. This is something that’s even more important for post-menopausal women in order to fight the effects of hormone shifts that otherwise accelerate the loss of muscle and bone mass, but can be well countered with heavy weight training.

But going back to ancient times, the Ancient Greeks even had a women’s version of their Olympic Games called the Haraean Games, where every four years in Olympia unmarried women could race each other.

But in all, humans seemingly realized right quick that being in good shape is a key to health, happiness and longevity, with Plato writing in Theaetetus, “And is not the bodily habit spoiled by… idleness, but preserved for a long time by motion and exercise?… Then motion is a good, and rest an evil, to the soul as well as to the body…”

A notion that seemingly with every new scientific study on the subject continually confirms. As famed longevity researcher Dr. Peter Attia sums up, “Exercise is one of the few areas where there is very little ambiguity… If you compare the top 20% of strength in a given age and sex bracket to the bottom 20% of strength you are talking about 150% to 200% difference in [likelihood] of all cause mortality at any given time [in that person’s life]. When you do the same type of analysis with peak cardiorespiratory fitness, if you just compare the least fit 25% to the middle core percentile, that’s about 100% difference in all cause mortality… So, whether you’re talking about cardio fitness, whether you’re talking about strength training, the difference in how long you live is unparalleled by any other intervention… that we have. And then that says nothing about the impact that those things have on your quality of life. I always say this to my patients- if all this exercise didn’t lengthen your life by one minute, it would still be worth it in terms of the quality of life improvements it brings….”

However, while lifting heavy objects like stones were common throughout history, up until extremely recently in history, exercise devices like the treadmill weren’t exactly on anyone’s radar, though that’s not to say humans didn’t have a version of them.

For example, as far back as the 2nd century AD, the Chinese had what were essentially stair climber devices in the form of stepped wheels that a person would walk on, turning the wheel as they did so. As far as history is aware, these weren’t used specifically for exercise, but rather to perform some practical work, such as use as a water pump, or for milling. The Ancient Romans used a similar stepping device to help lift heavy objects, with the walking wheel incorporated into a type of crane.

Similar devices were also used with animal power doing everything from grinding grains, to churning butter, though most of these tended to resemble a hamster’s wheel, with the animal, or sometimes humans, driving it from inside the device.

Humans even enlisted the help of man’s best friend in these devices, creating a specific breed of tiny dog known as turnspits, which were not only made to walk inside such wheels for hours on end, but also sized right and trained to be used as foot warmers when they weren’t working. More on turnspit dogs and their development in the Bonus Facts later.

Around the same time the turnspit dog was trotting away in kitchens across Britain, the devise that would be dubbed by contemporaries the “Treadmill” was born.

At the time, there had been a gradual shift in thinking when it came to dealing with criminals, from the general philosophy of they are irredeemable so “hang ‘em all and let god sort them out,” to that maybe… just maybe, prisoners could actually be reformed and made into functional members of society.

And thus, prison populations began to rise as more and more people were incarcerated for lengthy periods instead of just killing them or shipping them off to America, though once that latter outlet dried up when the colonial terrorists rose up against their rightful King, there was the well known shift to sending criminals to Australia instead.

But in any event, simultaneous to all this, a few other shifts had occurred thanks to some prison reform acts that concerned many in the general public. For example, rather than prisoner’s family and friends required to provide food and other necessities for the inmates, the state began more systematically doing so itself, given the previous system had the glaring error that if individuals were held for any length of time and had no one on the outside to provide them sustenance, blankets and the like, they, you know, could starve or potentially freeze to death. While for some crimes this would have been deemed by many to be a just punishment, for most who were simply in prison for minor offenses, being forced to starve to death or the like was deemed unjust.

However, providing such necessities for inmates cost money and seemed then a punishment for the law abiding citizens in having to pay for the criminal’s upkeep while incarcerated. Further, many, who clearly had no concept of what prison was actually like, argued providing prisoners with the bare necessities of life would make it so people would want to commit crimes just so they could go to prison.

Another issue with mass incarceration had been observed by officials at the time- impoverished children living on the streets that were imprisoned for minor crimes like stealing food to eat, tended to see older, hardened criminals in prison exerting their influence on the children, recruiting the kids to more or less work for them or their associates in more serious crimes later, as well as even training them up in some of the skills needed for such while they all sat around in jail. In essence, these kids and sometimes other adults went in as simple petty criminals, and came out much more likely to commit crimes than they were before.

All combined, some among the law abiding masses were concerned that all the prison reforms happening were just making it more likely that more crimes would be committed, not less.

As such, support for the age old practice of using prisoners for hard labor, where they wouldn’t have time for such socialization, would potentially learn a useful trade, and could help pay for their necessities, began to ramp up.

The problem here was this irked many on the outside as well, as if prisoners were being made to do things like make shoes for cheap, this would hurt the law abiding cobblers of the world’s businesses. Further, those incarcerated for only short periods would not be around long enough to learn some of these trades in order to produce good quality products.

And, of course, such labor didn’t necessarily deter people from wanting to go to prison inherently. In short, it was generally felt they needed to suffer more during all this.

It was a dill of a pickle.

Enter William Cubitt in 1817, who felt he had a solution to all these problems. While Cubitt would go on to have a prestigious career as an engineer, even being knighted by Queen Victoria for his work on the Crystal Palace project in London in 1851, at the time he was just starting out, making agricultural machinery such as windmills at an ironworks in Ipswitch.

Contemplating the perceived issues with jails at the time, Cubitt thought up what would ultimately be called the treadmill to solve the problem.

This was essentially a long stepping wheel meant to be driven by walking humans- on its surface not too dissimilar to many similar hamster wheel designs, but having those driving it walk on the outside, rather than within.

The designs of the device also ultimately had a number of innovative features built in, including arguably the first true ergometer. In a nutshell, he created mechanisms within the device which tracked things like steps, revolutions, and general work done, and included bells that would ring for things like when a set step interval was complete, or if the rotation speed became too slow.

Much like modern treadmills and stair stepper devices, the contraption also included handle bars for the walking individuals to steady themselves with as they trudged along.

Finally, a shaft from the device was then provided for use in powering pretty much anything, but in particular commonly used for attaching to a milling device, hence the name- treadmill.

Cubitt described that with his device, “There would be no difficulty in establishing a mill or manufactory near the boundary wall of a prison through which only a single shaft or axle would have to pass to communicate the power and motion.” And that, “The operations of the convicts would be precisely the same as those which are now effected by the ordinary powers of wind, water, steam, or horses, and they would have no more concern with the object of the machinery, or manufacture, than any of the above-named agents.”

In all, this would make the prisoners contributors to society in their labor, not take the jobs of any skilled craftsman or the like, required no training to operate, was excruciating physically, while also giving the prisoners no mental stimulation or distraction or opportunity to socialize, leaving them nothing to do but step step step for hours on end while they thought about what they’d done to get in prison, and how horrible it was to be marching on the treadmill.

Towards this end of making sure the inmates had no chance to talk with one another or even look around, a tweak to the original design was later added putting little walls in place separating the prisoners as they walked.

As one contemporary news report titled “A Description of the Tread-Mill” sums up, “The tread-mill at Brixton, that “terror to evil-doers,” …is the invention of Mr. Cubitt of Ipswitch, and is considered a great improvement in prison discipline… To provide regular and suitable employment for prisoners sentenced to hard labour, has been attended with considerable difficulty in many parts of the kingdom; the invention of the Discipline mill has removed the difficulty, and it is confidently hoped, that as its advantages and effects become better known, the introduction of the Mill will be universal in Houses of Correction.”

As for duration of their marches, this varied based on time of year and which prison, but for example, at Warwick Gaol, the prisoners were noted as walking approximately 10 hours a day in the summer, with a rate which equated to ascending approximately 17,000 vertical feet, or 5100 meters, of steps in that span.

Noteworthy the prisoners would get short breaks, for example, the referenced Brixton Prison treadmill had enough room for about 24 prisoners to walk, with at intervals one of the sidemost poor souls getting off, the remaining shifting over, and a resting prisoner getting back on. This general cycle gave each prisoner about 12 minutes of rest every hour. As alluded to, this entire thing was then all regulated by a series of bells ringing at given step intervals, as well as a bell for if the prisoners slowed down too much.

And if you’re wondering, as for general punishment if a prisoner didn’t keep up the pace, this tended to see them given a variety of punishments, including dietary restrictions… Because, you know, the best way to get more physical exertion and endurance out of someone is to cut their already poor allotment of calories.

Some models were even designed to emphasize punishment over productivity, making the treadmill do nothing at all, simply using a weighted contraption to provide resistance to the convict’s treading, with the idea being it would be worse for the criminal knowing their extreme and monotonous labor was completely pointless.

Right from the start, Cubitt’s invention caught on like wildfire, within a few decades versions of which being installed in 109 of Britain’s 200 prisons, and also being utilized across the pond in American prisons as well within 5 years, with the first such American device costing $3,050.99 (about $84,000 today). This one could hold 16 prisoners at a time and could process about 40-60 bushels of corn per day.

That said, almost immediately after its implementation in the United States the utility of the device was questioned, with the Prison Discipline Society of Boston writing that “the treadmill… teaches the convict nothing that can be useful to him on his discharge. It is not a profitable employment of human power.”

Groups pushing this narrative around the treadmill tended to support expanding efforts to use prisoners as factory workers instead, with the rule of the day calling for, to quote, “downcast eyes, lockstep marching, no talking, and constant work when outside the cells”, as well as punishing violating any of the rules or not working hard enough with the whip.

Funny enough, this was all generally thought to be much more humane than the treadmill, as well as would help better solve the labor shortage many regions of the United States had at the time.

On that note, because the past was the worst, the treadmill was seen as a particularly good punishment for runaway slaves, with the slave owners even earning money during the punishment. As for pay here, in one such case in 1841, slave holders were paid 18.75 cents per day (about $7 today) per slave marching on the treadmill.

As the century of marching prisoners progressed, however, a rather curious thing was observed. On the one hand, prison administrators noted that, on the whole, many prisoners seemed to get healthier over time marching on the mill. As one jailer at Lancaster Country Gaol claimed, “On examining those men who have worked longest at the Wheel, I have found them in perfect health, and not withstanding their expression of dislike to the work, have admitted that they have gained weight since they have been so employed.”

Similarly, it was claimed that the health of female prisoners at Colbath Fields House of Correction in 1835, in the general case, would improve after months of walking on the treadmill.

On the other hand, there was a subset of the prison population who seemed to get much sicker and even much more likely to die after, or sometimes even during, their sessions on the treadmill.

So what was going on here?

In the former case, assuming the accounts of inmates getting healthier were accurate, and given the propensity for many of the inmates to be alcoholics, it’s thought that the combination of the inmates sobering up over their time in prison, combined with exercising most all day, every day, that this was a great boon to their health, even despite their generally poor diets in prison.

And, indeed, more and more studies in modern times show that while diet is extremely important for health in a variety of ways, as long as you’re not overdoing it with calories and otherwise maintaining relatively healthy body fat levels, even individuals with generally poor diets from a nutritional standpoint still tend to see huge health marker improvements with good, consistent exercise.

In short, the prisoners may have been eating crap food, and even potentially somewhat deficient in calorie intake, but nonetheless, exercising all day, combined with a lengthy period of being fully sober was seemingly markedly improving their health… or some of them. Or, at least, if they got through the initial weeks.

On that note, on the other hand, starting from a potentially physiological less than ideal place commonly found with alcoholism, combined with perhaps the body not being used to really any form of exercise, let alone suddenly marching 6-10 grueling hours per day on what essentially was a stair climber, is all a rather abrupt shock to the system. And, well, for some prisoners, their bodies couldn’t take that abrupt of a ramp up in exercise, and they would just up and die, usually of cardiovascular issues.

As a March 28, 1885 edition of the British Medical Journal titled “Death on the Treadmill” discusses, “At an inquest which was recently held at Durham, as to the cause of death of a prisoner, Wm Morgan, who died shortly after being taken off the trademill, and who was found to suffer from heart-disease, a state of things was revealed, according to the account in the local paper…. It seems that the death-rate at Durham Prison has averaged for some time back one a week. Whatever may be the number of inmates, this rate is excessive, so much so, indeed, as to be hardly credible…. We do not sufficiently recognize the fact that a large number of prisoners convicted of what might be termed moral offences- drunkenness, vagabondism, etc. are subject of organic disease of one or more vital organs, induced by habitual excess; and that, directly these are deprived of their customary stimulus and subjected to prison-discipline and low diet, the victim succumbs to the previously dormant disease.”

They go on questioning whether the use of the treadmill in prisons should be abolished, writing, “…the question naturally arises, Is the treadmill a fit punishment for any one? Or rather, should it not be relegated to the limbo of the stocks and other remnants of barbarism?… “The mill” is not useful, and has proved itself occasionally injurious. It would therefore, be well for those in whose hands penal authority lies, to see if they cannot devise some mode of punishment which, whilst sufficiently deterrent, shall be free from direct danger to life, and which would embrace in its energy some… more useful object than grinding wind.”

On top of this, some complained that using prisoners in this way was still negatively impacting law abiding millers, all leading to one report in an 1882 edition of the Scientific American coming up with an alternate use for the treadmill, “It is suggested that all the penal advantages of the old treadmill system may be regained, with better economic results than with the factory system, by attaching dynamo-electric machines to the cranks, and storing electrically the energy developed… In this way, the prisons and penitentiaries would be converted into sources of brute energy to be sold for outside use in running machinery, electric lighting systems and the like…. The rounders might not like the place so well, but the honest public would like it better. Ten days on the treadmill would sober off a beat as effectually as ten days of idleness and in the interval he might help to store up many foot-tons of available energy. …the storage cell would never give offense to the citizen who was trying to support a family by the voluntary production of boots or hats, while the indirect economy that would flow from a simplification of prison work, with the prompter utilization of the strength of criminals of all grades and conditions, might more than make up for the loss through the less profitable employment of a few skilled hands.”

But such suggestions weren’t headed. The treadmill was simply deemed too much of a punishment for what was often relatively minor crimes by most, especially given its propensity to cause some of those marching on it to simply up and die.

Of course, through a modern lens, this likely could have been avoided by simply giving people proper diet, and then more slowly ramping up their exercise, instead of just putting the already physiologically compromised individual on the treadmill and having them march away most of their waking hours.

But either way, the treadmill was officially banned in prisons in Britain in 1902 and by 1912 had completely disappeared from America as well, deemed to be too cruel of a punishment, and generally a mostly pointless use of their time.

That said, similar devices were still put in use using animals, including some designs featuring flat surfaces with a type of belt covering rollers, where the animal would be made to march along on.

On that note, in the early 20th century, one Claude Lauraine Hagen got the idea of making such a flat device for humans to walk on for exercise purposes. He describes the device in his 1913 patent, labeling it a “Training-machine” to help with fighting what was named the #1 killer in the United States at the time “diseases of the heart”.

As for his general design, this is a rather familiar one to all of us today- “a rectangular frame, in the side pieces of which are mounted a series of rollers… over which rollers I prefer to mount distributing and wear take-up belts forming additional treads as well, and over such take-up belts I provide a tread or toe gripped belt of a peculiar construction, preferably formed with lateral slats joined by flexible hinged joints… In order to secure a machine which will be adjustable, and have the narrowest possible tread when used for persons of various size, I provide inclined side posts having sliding therein or thereon supporting rods for side rails which as raised or lowered will also be brought more or less toward the center of the apparatus, whereby a. short person with short arms will not have to reach as far out.”

He even thought of how it would be delivered or potentially compactly stored, writing, “in order to make the device readily shipable, I provide such side posts with removable bolts to permit the same to be folded inwardly over the rectangular frame… “

Whether Hagen actually ever built a working prototype isn’t clear today, but this, and many other similar treadmills that came after, while similar in design to the modern variety, lacked any driving motor, requiring the person walking or running on it to provide the locomotive power, which is handy for exercise in some ways, but decidedly less than ideal if one wanted to go for a proper run on one.

The next major milestone in treadmill design, including an integrated motor, came thanks to one co-developed by cardiologist Dr, Robert Bruce at the University of Washington in the mid-20th century, meant to be used with his revolutionary Bruce Protocol for evaluating cardiac function. Before this, it was sometimes considered dangerous to stress test cardiac function in this way, as well as just generally impractical to take ECG’s and the like with the patient doing anything but sitting or lying down.

Dr. Bruces’ device and method, in contrast, allowed for monitoring the patient’s heart, breathing, etc. while they were physically exerting themselves at various levels from walking to running, with his treadmill even including changing incline levels.

Bruces’ device and protocol quickly caught on among physicians, and even some gyms began using his treadmill, but it was incredibly expensive and not even close to accessible to the home consumer.

…That is until engineer William Staub read a 1968 book by famed physician and “Father of Aerobics”, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, simply titled Aerobics. The summation of the argument in the book was that good cardiovascular health is conducive to a better and longer life, with Cooper suggesting a treadmill device as could be found in hospitals could revolutionize home fitness, getting more people running regardless of weather, time of day or night, or any outside concern of safety… the problem was, as Cooper wrote, those treadmills were impossibly expensive for home consumers.

After reading this, Staub went down to the shop at his company, Besco, and while his workers continued their normal work of making various parts for aircraft, he began designing and constructing a much simpler version of the treadmill than doctors were using. His prototype ultimately mostly just comprised of an electric motor, a belt, a frame and handle to hold onto, 40 rollers, and an on off switch.

After completing the prototype, Staub sent it to Dr. Cooper for his thoughts and feedback on the design. The good doctor loved it, decided to help fund the development of the commercial version, the PaceMaster which was initially sold for $399 or about $3300 today, and when it was in production, promoted it to his many fitness inclined acolytes.

The treadmill revolution had begun.

While sales were initially somewhat lackluster, within a decade of its launch, they had risen to some 2,000 treadmills sold per year, and a little over a decade after that in the 1990s, the company was selling about 35,000 units per year. Today around 50 million Americans, that’s about 1 in 6, use a treadmill every year, being one of the most popular pieces of home and commercial gym equipment in the world. As Dr. Cooper summed up of Staub’s invention, “He took away a lot of the excuses people had not to exercise. They don’t have to worry about the weather, safety or whatever may be. I don’t know how long he exercised for himself, but I know he didn’t die early.”

For the record on this one, Staub’s son noted his father did exercise regularly on his treadmill, all the way up to his death at the age of 96.

But going back to the treadmill, day or night, good weather or bad, the treadmill is there… Ready to be used as a place to drape your laundry.

Because, you see, in the general case, while handy devices, much like their wheeled ancestors, treadmills can still be quite torturous to use from the sheer monotony of walking, or running along, not going anywhere, just staring at your wall thinking about where your life went wrong…

Bonus Facts:

And now how about those promised Bonus Facts on turnspit dogs and the frankly disturbing tale of Oscar Wilde and why you should never look too deeply into your heroes:

First, the turnspit- considering how most dogs in the Western world these days are treated as a member of the family, it’s often easy to forget that the vast majority of our furry friends up until very recently were bred for a specific purpose. Perhaps no dog was bred for a more specific purpose than the now extinct aforementioned turnspit.

As mentioned, the turnspit was so named because it was literally bred just to run for hours on a tiny wheel that turned a spit.

You see, a few hundred years ago the generally preferred method for cooking a large piece of meat evenly was to put it on a spit and rotate it until it was fully cooked. Cooking meat thoroughly on a spit takes anywhere between 40 and 80 minutes per kilo depending on which meat it is you’re cooking. Needless to say, roasting an adult hog on the fire for a party took an incredibly long time.

Prior to the introduction of turnspits around the 16th century, the painstakingly tedious and unrelenting job of turning the spit was left to the lowest ranking member of the household, “usually a small boy”, though in larger households the size of the spit necessitated delegating the job to an adult. The job was tough, cruel and often resulted in the poor soul tasked with doing it suffering from burns, blisters and exhaustion. What made the job more difficult was that the spitjacks, as they were known, had to work in full uniform. In fact, during Tudor times, spitjacks working in Hampton Court were told that they had to stop working in the nude as well as to stop urinating in the fireplace, because nobody wants their meat smoked with evaporated pee… Or, I mean, if you do, we here at TodayIFoundOut don’t judge. Just, you know, not everybody has the same kinks.

While we’d like to say that spitjacks were replaced by dogs out of concern for their health, the truth is that dogs could work longer hours without a break and they didn’t need to be paid in anything other than food. This is why in the 16th century, spitjacks were phased out in favour of a small machine powered by an even smaller dog.

So were the dogs treated any better than the spitjacks? Nope. Turnspits were generally seen more as kitchen tools than fuzzy members of the household who needed just as many belly rubs and chin scratches as normal dogs.

Along with being subjected to the same long hours and awful conditions as the human spitjacks before them, turnspits would often be cruelly mistreated by their owners. For instance, to train them to run at the correct speed, a common method was simply to throw a hot coal into the dog’s wheel every time it slowed too much. During their off-time, the exhausted turnspits were known to work great as footwarmers, even apparently commonly brought to church for that exact purpose.

Turnspits were ultimately replaced by steam-powered machines and by the end of the 19th century the breed officially was declared extinct.

Despite the fact that, for a few centuries, the turnspit could be found in almost every large home in England, including the homes of royalty, nobody anywhere bothered to note down exactly what breeding process went into creating the dog that had ensured so many people had evenly cooked dinners. All we have to go on are historical descriptions of the breed which described it as “long-bodied”, “crooked-legged” and “ugly”. We also have a single stuffed specimen called Whiskey.

It’s not all bad though; the horrific treatment turnspits were subjected to is reportedly what inspired Henry Bergh to start the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which in turn has resulted in countless animals being saved from abuse and cruelty.

Oscar Wilde

Speaking of cruelty to living things, in the never look into your heroes rabbit hole files- let’s talk about Oscar Wilde, who was both the recipient of a measure of cruelty completely unjustly from a modern lens, but also paradoxically from a modern lens completely deserved it and much, much more. And, on that note, I assure you, no matter which way you swing or how much you love his work, you will not like him by the end of this video.

Confused?

Well, as many know, Oscar Wilde was ultimately found guilty of “gross indecency with certain male persons”, today often thus claimed he was more or less simply being unjustly punished for homosexual acts. And that’s very true. And the results were devastating, not just because of the two year prison sentence, but as Wilde would sum up, “lost wife, children, fame, honour, position, wealth.”

While Wilde and about 50,000 others would be given a posthumous pardon in 2017 after the passing of the Policing and Crime Act of 2017, it turns out the authorities issuing those pardons may have wanted to look closer at the court documents and evidence leveled against Wilde to see if he actually deserved a pardon… because while there was nothing grossly indecent about a subset of his acts, the ones with other consenting adults, there were a whole lot of others that were with an entirely less consenting, underage group. And, indeed, most of the three trials that evidence was brought to bear against him were hyper focusing on those youthful instances for good reason after a recent scandal that had rocked Britain, and the masses still pretty pissed off about it.

Before I go further, let’s just say this is about to get dark and so just fair warning, though I’ll do my best to avoid things getting too explicit, as many of the witnesses, including his victim’s, accounts were not shy about being. If you’d like to read the transcripts for yourself, they are readily available with a little googling.

But to begin with, it’s important to get some very brief context leading up to Wilde’s trials in 1895. Enter the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889. The full details of it are mostly irrelevant here, but suffice it to say a brothel catering to gay or bisexual men was unearthed on Cleveland Street, London at that point, with three key facts enraging the masses in the aftermath beyond the obvious one of homosexual acts at the time being considered evil- first, it was allegedly frequented by many elite of society, up to and including certain very prominent royals. Second, many of those offering their services from that establishment were very young teen boys. And third, there seemed to be a positively Epstein level effort to cover up who all were involved here, and even to help get those who were known to be involved off on abnormally light sentences, or sometimes no punishment at all.

For example, the ring leader of it all, Charles Hammond, was seemingly allowed to escape to France and later emigrated to the United States, with the Prime Minister himself pushing for no extradition proceedings or any effort at all to try to get him back and prosecute him. Those inclined to believe there was a major coverup happening here, which was basically everyone, conjectured this was because Hammond simply had too much dirt on too many very prominent individuals for any among the elite wanting him to get his day in court. Thus, he was more or less let go and the case against him was dropped.

This particular scandal had initially started when a 15 year old boy (and note here the age of consent in Britain at the time was 16) named Charles Thomas Swinscow was found with several weeks worth of wages at a time when messenger boys, as he was allegedly working as, were not allowed to carry personal cash during work. Police initially thought he must have stolen the money, but it later came out he’d simply been working as a prostitute for Hammond who, as noted, ran a brothel on Cleveland Street. In a nutshell, many of Hammond’s boys also worked as telegraph or messenger boys, or at least allegedly so, so it was easy to cover for why these lower class boys were going around to various prominent individuals’ homes.

While the masses were upset about the homosexual relationship side of things because the past was the worst, one thing they were more justifiably upset about even through a modern lens was the use of these lower class teens, including ones under the age of consent, for this purpose, with it seen as the elite exploiting and corrupting the telegraph boys with very little the boys could have done about it.

With all this still relatively fresh on the masses minds, and generally still irked that none of the elite had been made to pay for their crimes in such an operation, well, enter one of the elite in Oscar Wilde, who seems to have enjoyed the services of such telegraph boys himself and more or less shot himself in the foot making sure everybody ended up knowing about it.

While some in more modern times have defended Wilde claiming that the youngest boys were 16, which again is the age of consent in the UK, to begin with, regardless, paying for such services from someone under 18 is illegal today. And in any event, there were also plenty of accounts of him paying for the services of teens at least as young as 13 or 14, which was below the age of consent in Britain then too after the passing of The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which had, among other things, raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 in an effort to help suppress a major problem at the time of young teens of both sexes being forced to work in brothels or otherwise exploited by adults in this way.

Famed French author André Gide, who quite openly did the same, though noteworthy the age of consent at the time was 13 in France, so he could get away with not being shy about it, includes in his journal just such an occasion where he states Wilde had brought he and Gide two very young teens to spend the night with. In his journal, Gide glows about how great the night was for him and Wilde… But I’m not going to read the rather explicit journal entry here, because, frankly, I just don’t want to read it again.

But going back to Wilde’s legal issues because of such activities, they all started when Wilde made the monumentally stupid decision to sue the Marquis of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, the father of one of Wilde’s lovers, after Queensberry had written on a card for all to see that Wilde was a sodomite.

Wilde took offense to this, and decided to go after Queensberry to clear his name. This was despite that many of Wilde’s friends, who both knew well his activities and in some cases their own with Wilde, strongly advised he not do so because it would be relatively easy to prove in court that he had done these things given the sheer volume of individuals Wilde had slept with and how relatively open Wilde had been about it all.

Nevertheless, Wilde proceeded, resulting in Queensberry’s arrest and then needing to prove his statement against Wilde. He thus hired private investigators to gather evidence against Wilde and it was on- First with the trial against Queensberry, which ended after just three days when the evidence against Wilde was rather overwhelming and Wilde ceased trying to disprove it.

But, of course, now it was slightly more definitively publicly known that Wilde had likely done these things, which spurred another trial, this one a criminal one against Wilde himself.

On that note, looking over all the testimonies and evidence leveled against Wilde in the three trials, among other things prosecutors questioned Wilde about the slew of boys who he’d given, to quote “intellectual treats” to, such as fine clothes and even in one case a silver-mounted walking stick. On these, Wilde didn’t deny he’d done such in the general case, at which point the prosecutor further grilled him on why nearly universally these young boys were not sons of prominent companions or the like he might otherwise be expected to associate with, but almost universally just random, often impoverished and illiterate boys that he also seemed to not only lavish gifts on, but spend a lot of private time with, including overnight visits.

Wilde initially claimed he simply enjoyed the company of young boys for completely platonic reasons, stating, “I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied.” And “I recognize no social distinctions at all of any kind, and to me youth, the mere fact of youth, is so wonderful that I would sooner talk to a young man for half-an-hour than be–well–cross-examined in court.”

When questioned further in one case where he took a newspaper boy and spent a weekend with him in a Brighton hotel, during which he appears to have attempted to cover up the boy’s origins by buying him a suit that included an insignia from an elite private boy’s school, Wilde claimed the choice of suit was simply because the boy had liked the school’s colors and the boy had picked it out himself.

In another instance, one of the boys had worked for Wilde’s publisher as an office boy, but with aspirations to someday be a great writer himself. The teen testified Wilde used this fact to cultivate a relationship with him, which included sexual contact, only to be fired from the publishing house not long after when his relationship with Wilde had been discovered.

In yet another instance, a chambermaid, Margaret Cotta, at the Savoy Hotel where Wilde frequently entertained his young teen “renters”, testified that Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas had met up at the hotel together, and the next morning when she went to clean their room, she found, to quote her, a “common boy, rough looking, about 14 years of age’ in Wilde’s bed, the sheets of which ‘were always in a most disgusting state… [with] traces of vaseline, soil…” and I’m just going to stop the quote right there because it gets much worse.

Others who worked at the hotel or various places frequented by Wilde, also testified that Wilde often unabashedly kissed many of the page boys, as well as, once again, frequently purchased gifts for them, had relatively large sums of money given to them for tips after he’d been closeted with them, the list goes on and on.

In yet another case, a 16 year old apprentice electrician Wallis Grainger testified that Wilde had taken him to a cottage, ironically the one near Goring-on-Thames that Wilde had written An Ideal Husband at- a play featuring blackmail and corruption- and “’came into my bedroom and woke me up and told me to come into his bedroom which was next door…” and just going to stop right there on that quote too.

Grainger also claimed that Wilde had stated that if Grainger ever revealed the nature of their relationship, Wilde would ensure he would find himself in, to quote Grainger, “very serious trouble.”

Wilde’s own governess to his sons, Gertrude Simmons, likewise testified against him, noting his frequently being extremely affectionate with certain young boys, including a young boat boy by the name of George Hughes.

The testimonies go on and on, which, granted, at the time it was not at all unheard of for individuals to bribe the impoverished to give false evidence. However, given the overwhelming amount of it both in these case, including the manny elements Wilde himself didn’t deny, as well as outside letters and journals only fully known about today from Wilde himself, friends and others, let’s just say few think the general thrust of what Wilde was being accused of was false, quite a bit of it being extremely illegal today, but even in his time in instances where the teen was under 16 would have been illegal for reasons that had nothing to do with the gender of the teen.

And it is at this point that I’m not really inclined to continue in our normally overly thorough way quoting countless primary documents and smoking guns, so as to leave no doubt it’s not a narrative we are spinning, but simply the facts as they were. In this case, frankly I just don’t want to read the quotes here, but go google to your heart’s content if you’re interested in greater detail.

Ultimately during the whole ordeal, Wilde gave his famous speech about “The love that dare not speak its name” which is today often hailed as a beautiful defense of homosexuality, and otherwise very much is in parts if one doesn’t read the context of the scope of what he was being tried for- not just his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas or other consenting adults, but with a myriad of young teens that had been roped into a prostitution ring.

Things become much less inspiring in the speech given Wilde explicitly references relationships between an older man with a younger, which technically does fit between himself and Douglas who was almost two decades his junior, but in the context of the rest of the trial, ooof. To quote Wilde,

“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan… It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect…. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name”, and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”

In the end, while Wilde did get off during the first criminal trial owing to one of the jurors inexplicably refusing to convict him, the second didn’t go so well for him and he was sentenced to two years in prison.

While in prison, Wilde would lament in a letter to the Home Secretary, he had been “helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and drove [me] to… hideous ruin.”

That said, when he got out of jail and went into a sort of exile, he seems to have jumped right back into it, as his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas noted, “he was hand in glove with all the little boys on the Boulevard. He never attempted to conceal it.” And Wilde himself wrote in a letter to a friend, “Today I bade good-bye, with tears and one kiss, to the beautiful Greek boy. . . he is the nicest boy you ever introduced to me.”

In the end, Oscar Wilde was unequivocally one of the greatest wordsmiths to ever walk the earth, and one can at least still admire him for that. He was also unjustly vilified for his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and seemingly quite a few other consenting adult men… or I mean, kind of unjustly vilified, as it was still him cheating on his wife… a lot. Not exactly considered an acceptable behavior in most countries, outside of maybe France, as Simon and I cover in our BrainFood Show episode The Common Differences Between the U.S. and Europe. The statistics in France on this one are genuinely mind boggling, at least from an American perspective. Link below.

The point being, there is good reason Wilde has long been held as the poster child of how unjust a period of history was for gay or bisexual individuals, especially as it’s only been since the year 2000 that many of the testimonies and evidence leveled against Wilde have been publicly known. That said, there still was enough existing evidence, letters, and the like before this that some particularly sleuthy biographers should have long ago covered it all much more thoroughly for the masses.

But at the same time, of course, when looking at any individual from history too closely, well, you’re going to quite commonly find they were all extremely racist, sexist, and, much like Wilde, did things with people who were of an age that if done today, would see that person behind bars for a good long time. Thus, it’s generally advisable to judge people more on the morals and precepts of their own eras, rather than our own, lest there’s quite literally almost no one in history we could write about and admire for anything, except for Mister Rogers.

That said, it’s harder to continue admiring some than others.

In the end, basically every facet of Wilde’s trials and story with it on all sides is the quintessential example of two universal truths- never meet your heroes (unless that hero is Mister Rogers), and the past was the absolute worst.

The post The Dark Origins of the Treadmill and Why Oscar Wilde was the Worst appeared first on Today I Found Out.

At exactly 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb, codenamed Trinity, detonated over the desert in New Mexico, unleashing in an instant the power of 18,000 tons of TNT. The atomic age had begun. As night turned to day and a fireball 200 metres across rose into the sky, the scientists of the Manhattan Project who had built the bomb reacted in different ways. Some were jubilant, others more somber. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, famously recalled a line from the Hindu scripture (ba-ga-vad gee-ta)  Baghavad Gita: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”; while Kenneth Bainbridge, director of the Trinity test, was more blunt, stating: “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” Elsewhere around the test site, money frantically changed hands as scientists settled a series of private bets. Some had wagered that the test would be a dud, or that it would reach just a fraction of its predicted yield. But others, including Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, had wagered on a more disturbing outcome: that the intense heat of the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, setting off an unstoppable chain reaction that would wipe out all life on earth. This apocalyptic bet has since become an infamous part of nuclear lore, but does it have any basis in reality? Could the Trinity test – or any nuclear weapon, for that matter – actually have set earth’s atmosphere ablaze?

Well, let’s dive into it, shall we?

Fear of a nuclear reaction running amok goes back to the earliest days of nuclear weapons research. In his 1969 memoir Inside the Third Reich, former Nazi Minister of Armaments Albert Speer recalled a conversation between Adolf Hitler and physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the German atomic bomb project:

“Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction. Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.”

However, the notion of a nuclear weapon setting fire to the atmosphere originated with Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, who would go on to design the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. In a 1991 interview, German physicist Hans Bethe, director of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division, recalled the origins of the idea:

“One day at Berkeley [in 1942]… Teller came to the office and said, “Well, what would happen to the air if an atomic bomb were exploded in the air?”  The original idea about the hydrogen bomb was that one would explode an atomic bomb and then simply the heat from the atomic bomb would ignite a large vessel of deuterium… and make it react.  So Teller said, “Well, how about the air?  There’s nitrogen in the air, and you can have a nuclear reaction in which two nitrogen nuclei collide and become oxygen plus carbon, and in this process you set free a lot of energy.  Couldn’t that happen?”  And that caused great excitement. Oppenheimer got quite excited and said, “That’s a terrible possibility.””

When more detailed calculations seemingly confirmed that Teller’s scenario was indeed possible, Oppenheimer tracked down Arthur Compton, director of the Manhattan Project’s metallurgical laboratory, while he was on vacation with his family in Michigan. The pair spent many hours on the shores of Oswego Lake furiously debating Teller’s prediction. In 1959, Compton was interviewed by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck for a feature in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled The Bomb – the End of the World? which helped bring the atmospheric ignition theory to public attention:

“Hydrogen nuclei,” Arthur Compton explained to me, “are unstable, and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy, as they do on the sun. To set off such a reaction would require a very high temperature, but might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about hydrogen in sea water? Might not the explosion of the atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself? Nor was this all that Oppenheimer feared. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might not it, too, be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?”

“The earth would be vaporized,” I said.

“Exactly,” Compton said, and with that gravity! “It would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run the chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”

Later in the piece, Buck states:

“If, after calculation, [Compton] said, it were proved that the chances were more than approximately three in one million that the earth would be vaporized by the atomic explosion, he would not proceed with the project. Calculation proved the figures slightly less – and the project continued.”

Nonetheless, the possibility of destroying the world continued to weigh on the Manhattan Project scientists’ minds, so over the course of 1943 and 1944, several more individuals tried to put the matter to rest once and for all. As Hans Bethe explained in his 1991 interview:

“Teller at Los Alamos put a very good calculator on this problem, Emil Konopinski, who was an expert on weak interactors, and Konopinski…showed that it was incredibly impossible to set the hydrogen, to set the atmosphere on fire.” 

Further calculations conducted by Hans Bethe and Edward Teller appeared to confirm Konopinski’s results, allaying any lingering doubts and allowing the Trinity test to proceed as planned. Teller and Konopinski, along with Cloyd Marvin, later summarized their findings in a 1946 paper titled Ignition of the Atmosphere With Nuclear Bombs, in which they concluded that:

“…whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions. This is true even with rather extravagant assumptions concerning the reactivity of the nitrogen nuclei of the air. The only disquieting feature is that the “safety factor” i.e. the ratio of losses togas of energy, decreases rapidly with initial temperature, and descends to a value of only about 1.6 just beyond a 10-MeV temperature. It is impossible to reach such temperatures unless fission bombs or thermonuclear bombs are used which greatly exceed the bombs now under consideration. But even if bombs of the required volume (i.e. greater than 1000 cubic meters) are employed, energy transfer from electrons to light quanta by Compton scattering will provide a further safety factor and will make a chain reaction in air impossible.”

For the uninitiated, MeV stands for Mega Electron-Volt, and is a unit of energy equivalent to 1.6×10-13 Joules. Also, Compton scattering, named after Arthur Compton, refers to the elastic transfer of kinetic energy from a photon to an electron – or vice-versa.

Interestingly, the difficulty of igniting a chain reaction in atmospheric nitrogen foreshadowed the difficulties Teller would later encounter in developing his fusion-based ‘Super” or hydrogen bomb. Initially, Teller assumed that the heat and pressure of a conventional nuclear weapon would be sufficient to induce fusion in liquid Deuterium or Heavy Hydrogen. When this turned out not to be the case, Teller and Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam were forced to develop an entirely different mechanism known as radiation implosion to initiate a fusion reaction – but that is a subject for another video.

Yet despite Bethe, Teller, and Konopinski’s reassuring calculations, some continued to harbour grave doubts, as Bethe later recalled:

“But of course, it spooked Compton. In [his] mind it was not set to rest.  He didn’t see my calculations.  He even less saw Konopinski’s much better calculations, so it was still spooking in his mind when he gave an interview at some point, and so it got into the open literature, and people are still excited about it.”

But what about Enrico Fermi’s infamous bet in the lead-up to the Trinity test? Well, according to Bethe, this was actually intended as a joke:

“Fermi, of course, didn’t believe that this was possible, but just to relieve the tension at the Los Alamos Trinity test, he said, “Now, let’s make a bet whether the atmosphere will be set on fire by this test.” And I think maybe a few people took that bet.” 

Among those who took Fermi’s bet were U.S. Army soldiers assigned to guard the test site, who apparently needed some serious instruction in logic, given that if that had actually happened, they’d never have been able to collect their winnings. Either way, some of these soldiers were so disturbed by the possibility of incinerating the world that they asked to be relieved from their duties prior to the test – provoking considerable fury from Kenneth Bainbridge.

But in any event, outside of Fermi’s facetious wager, the bets among the Manhattan Project scientists concerned the explosive yield of the test. Edward Teller, for example, predicted 45 kilotons of TNT. Physicist Isidor Rabi chose 18 kilotons – ultimately winning him the betting pool – Hans Bethe 8 kilotons, Robert Oppenheimer 0.3 kilotons, and Ordnance Department leader Norman Ramsey zero kilotons – a complete dud. The latter scenario was the one most feared by Bainbridge, who later wrote:

“My personal nightmare was knowing that if the bomb didn’t go off or hangfired, I, as head of the test, would have to go to the [test] tower first and seek to find out what had gone wrong.”

In the end, however, the test went exactly as planned, and of the more than 2,000 nuclear weapons that have been detonated since July 16, 1945, not one has set the atmosphere on fire. This includes the Tsar Bomba dropped by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961, which at 50 Megatons remains the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated.

But like all good stories, the idea of atmospheric ignition simply refuses to die. In 1975, Horace C. Dudley, a professor of radiation physics at the University of Illinois Medical Center, published a letter of concern titled The Ultimate Catastrophe in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which he reiterated Teller and Compton’s apocalyptic predictions from the 1940s. The letter prompted a rebuttal from Hans Bethe, who stated:

“There was never any possibility of causing a thermonuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere. There was never “a probability of slightly less than three parts in a million,” as Dudley claimed. Ignition is not a matter of probabilities; it is simply impossible…[furthermore] it is totally unnecessary to add to the many good reasons against nuclear war, one which simply is not true.”

Nonetheless, Dudley’s letter attracted considerable attention among U.S. Government policy makers, prompting Roger Batzel, director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, to weigh in on the debate:

“I will not comment directly on the several pejorative comments made about nuclear energy production and weapons research. Nor will I attempt to clear up Professor Dudley’s confusion over variable half-lives, the availability of “aether energy,” the earth’s gravitational field, or the reproducibility of large-scale physical phenomena…In summary, extremely conservative calculations have demonstrated that it is completely impossible for either the earth’s atmosphere or sea to sustain fusion reactions of either thermonuclear or nuclear chain reaction type. In particular, such reactions cannot be triggered by the explosion of nuclear weapons, even those having unrealistically high yield and impractically high yield-to-weight.”

In response, Dudley published another letter proposing a number of other – equally unlikely – runaway chain-reaction scenarios. The debate was put to rest by Bernard Felt, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who wrote: 

“However, since Dr. Dudley chose in his rebuttal to give new emphasis to the possibility of a hydrogen plus hydrogen reaction in the ocean, Dr. Bethe would be fully justified in wishing to respond to this, thereby setting off a chain reaction which we could probably not contain.

Rather than risk this contingency, I take the liberty of noting that, contrary to Dr. Dudley’s assertion, the hydrogen plus hydrogen reaction does differ in kind from that of deuterium plus deuterium, to the extent that this reaction requires temperatures and pressures comparable to those occurring in the interior of the Sun. Dr. Bethe’s point about the impossibility of a fusion chain reaction in the oceans therefore remains well-taken.”

Ironically, within just a few years the debate over the effects of nuclear war would shift from one of global incineration to global refrigeration as scientists like Richard Turco and Carl Sagan developed the idea of “Nuclear Winter” – the hypothetical cooling of the earth’s climate due to smoke and dust thrown up by nuclear explosions blotting out the sun. But this, too, is a subject for another video. For now, let us be thankful that the apocalyptic nuclear Sword of Damocles which has hung over humanity’s head for 80 years has yet to fall en masse, and that theories of global incineration and nuclear winter remain firmly in the realm of speculation.

The post Is It Really Possible for a Nuke to Ignite the Atmosphere? appeared first on Today I Found Out.

Few brands are as closely associated with the idea of “luxury” as Rolls-Royce, a car manufacturer so fancy schmancy that the company’s official website doesn’t even bother to list how much the things it sells are. Rolls-Royce knows that for anyone serious about buying one of their automobiles, price is not a concern. And to be clear, what you can get for said insane amount of money is likewise insane in customization, which we’re going to now talk about because it’s a lot more interesting, and occasionally bizarre, than even we originally thought when dreaming up this topic.

But in any event, to this end, Rolls-Royce, who as a company can be fairly certain that the average person strolling into one of their showrooms likely has a credit card with a limit rivalling the GDP of a small nation, offers clients a level of customisation and self-expression seldom seen outside of old episodes of Pimp My Ride or the Need For Speed games to the point that literally every every car they sell is one of a kind. Or as we like to call the brand- Billionaire Build a Bear.

One thing we should clarify first though is that even with a luxury brand like Rolls-Royce there are levels to the fanciness on offer with the price increasing accordingly. Now, we know we said in the introduction that Rolls-Royce themselves don’t list how much their cars cost because that would be tacky and only for plebians, but it’s not hard to find out how much they sell for by consulting things like trade magazines or browsing the secondary market.

With this in mind the least you’d be looking to spend on a new Rolls-Royce is about £250,000 (about $310,000) for a stock Rolls-Royce Ghost which online auction site Auto Trader describes as the brand’s “entry level model”. Meanwhile a Rolls-Royce Phantom will set you back a cool £350,000 (about $450,000). If this is too rich for your blood, older models, like from the 70’s, sometimes pop up for sale for as little as £10,000 (about $12,000). As good a deal as this may sound be warned, older models of many luxury cars are very often a huge pain in the butt to fix and maintain, with collectors frequently bemoaning that you can easily spend more than a car’s listed value, just to get it to run
But who cares if a car runs, as long as it’s flashing you are extremely wealthy and not at all an effort to compensate for your insecurities….

Moving on, while these prices give us a good baseline for what a Rolls-Royce would cost you, the company is keenly aware that nobody with Rolls-Royce money is looking to buy a stock model to drive around in. They want to show that crap off like their trophy wife who definitely is with them because they love them.

As such, while the cost of a base model of each car the company sells is easy enough to find, the real cost can balloon to several times that when you take into account all of the extra stuff the company offers prospective clients.

So how about an example.

Let’s start with perhaps the single simplest thing to pick from when buying a car. The colour. Which according to Nick Osy de Zegwart, a bespoke sales manager for the brand, notes as being generally the first thing he’ll discuss with a customer. With that in mind how many options do you think seem reasonable? 50? 100? 1000?

Well, take that last number and multiply it by 40 because as standard Rolls-Royce offers customers a choice from a selection of over 44,000 different colour swatches. Keep in mind, these are the default choices the company offers and, if you so choose, you can just make up your own colour with the company offering a bespoke colour matching service where a member of their design team will create a custom colour based on any item or object you can think of. As an idea of how specific this service is, the company, when prodded, has admitted to colour-matching a car to a client’s dog. Specifically an Irish Setter, which the company notes was not harmed during the colour matching process. Dogs aside, other objects the company has matched the colour of cars to include one client’s favourite shoe, a shade of lipstick and in one case, a rubber glove the buyer just really liked the colour of… We don’t want to know….

The colour can be further customised with a variety of finishes. These range from standard rich people stuff like microscopic flakes of gold or crushed pearl to make it shine to specially engineered super-paint capable of reflecting light in every colour of the visible spectrum. In regards to the last one, that’s not hyperbole with the company reportedly spending in excess of a year developing a literal one-of-a-kind paint they dubbed “Lunaflair” for a single client whose only prompt was that they wanted the colour of their car to resemble an optical phenomenon called the lunar halo, an eerily beautiful and rare optical illusion caused by the “refraction of moonlight from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere”. An effect paint engineers at Rolls-Royce were ultimately able to replicate after, as noted, a year of solid experimentation. Which means that the actual list of colours a client can choose from is theoretically infinite as the engineers in charge of the process are seemingly skilled enough to colour match vague abstract concepts.

Once a client decides on a colour or even the inspiration for a colour, Rolls-Royce will then patent the steps that led to its creation so that nobody else can use it. At least not without asking first with the company noting that anybody wanting to use the same custom colour as another needs their written permission to do so.

To ensure the colour matches exactly and that nothing contaminates it the people tasked with ultimately painting a given car aren’t allowed to wear makeup and are only permitted to wear a specific brand of deodorant provided by Rolls-Royce.

But we’re not even done with colour yet because something the Rolls-Royce Commissioning Suite, where a bunch of these initial decisions are made, contains is a special light custom made for the purpose capable of replicating the exact way and angle the sun shines in different regions of the world. This light will then be shone onto a model Rolls-Royce painted in whatever shade the customer requests so that they can see what the car would look like sitting on their own driveway, wherever that happens to be.
While selecting the colour they want their motorcar to be (as a brand this is near exclusively how Rolls-Royce refers to the vehicles it sells because “car” would be too common we guess) customers can also decide whether or not they’d like their purchase to sport a coachline when it’s finished. Deceptively simple looking, this aesthetic addition is literally the final touch added to the vehicle and at the time of writing this script, every single one is painted by a single guy. Mark Court.

A man who cut his teeth painting the signs that appear outside of pubs, Court reputedly has the steadiest hand of any man in Britain and is so trusted by the brand that he is allowed to paint each line freehand. A final flourish of skill akin to a painter signing their latest masterpiece. As with everything else on the car, this coachline can be tailored to the customer’s liking and it’s common for designers to incorporate elements of the buyer’s personality into the finished product. This can be as simple as stylised initials or as complex as a perfect replica of the owner’s family crest. As you might imagine, a lot of people buying these things have family crests because, sure, why not?

This said, while the coachline is seen as a symbol of the brand, customers don’t necessarily have to have one added because, well, it is their car after all. However, if at any point the customer changes their mind about this, Rolls-Royces will fly Mark out, anywhere in the world, to add it. This is in keeping with the company’s ethos of luxury being synonymous with service and it will similarly fly out engineers to fix faults at the customer’s convenience if they so desire.

But back to Mark Court- the level of trust placed in him is inordinate and it’s noted that if, at any point, he made a mistake, the entire car would need to be sandblasted back to stock and entirely repainted. When asked about the pressures of this and whether or not he’s ever made a mistake Court’s response in a company video released in 2019 was simply -“I don’t make mistakes. I work for Rolls-Royce.”

Moving to the interior of the car, this is similarly customised entirely to the customers tastes and whims with virtually every aspect of the interior being customisable in some way, shape or form. Again, the colour of everything can be bespoke and made to match either the outside of the car or whatever the customer fancies.

Now we know what you’re thinking, surely there’s a limit to this, right? Like Rolls-Royce does have a reputation to maintain at the end of the day and surely they’d step in or tastefully try to steer a customer in another direction if they started asking for stuff that would look fugly. Well apparently not with the previously quoted Nick Osy de Zegwart stating as much in an interview in 2016. Specifically de Zegwart, when asked to comment on any “strange combinations” of colour and style he’d seen noted flatly – “We’re not the taste police.”

Adding that each bespoke Rolls-Royce is “an expression of one’s personality”, which means that whatever the customer wants, the customer gets. To this end some of the weirder things Rolls-Royce have included in the interior of vehicles they’ve made include a speedometer in the backseat so the customer could ensure their driver wasn’t speeding, a cigar humidifier and a cup holder.

If that last one doesn’t sound impressive we should clarify that this was a special cup holder specifically designed to carry the customer, a sumo wrestler’s, favourite brand of drink. Which the company ensured would fit exactly by flying to Japan, buying one and then tailoring the cup holder to its exact measurements.

Keeping with the interior, most stock Rolls-Royce models come with leather seats as standard. Which sounds far too pedestrian and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the leather seats in a Rolls-Royce are a literal cut above the fare offered in other cars. For starters Rolls-Royce only uses leather sources from bulls.

Why?

Well leather from a bull is generally less prone to imperfections owing to the fact bulls can’t get pregnant, which means their skin doesn’t typically get stretch marks. Likewise, bulls destined to cushion the buttholes of occasional assholes are raised in high altitude environments as such places tend to have less biting insects which could, again, impact the ultimate quality of leather made from the animals they bite. Even with all of these measures taken though sometimes there are issues, even if the imperfections are literally unobservable to the human eye and only visible on spectrometer tests the company conducts, because of course they do. In these cases, Rolls-Royce will discard the leather. With the company famously selling leather that doesn’t meet its exacting standards to the high-end fashion industry.

For customers who don’t want to sit on part of the corpse of a cow, other options for interiors include goat, ostrich and a number of artificial options. Though ultimately the interior can be made from whatever material a customer wishes. Even if said material is illegal, though for this one Rolls Royce won’t be involved for legal reasons.

But it turns out when researching, we stumbled across an article from 2021 about a Rolls-Royce that was seized by Italian authorities sporting crocodile leather seats sourced from an endangered example of the species. To be clear, Rolls-Royce does offer crocodile leather as an option, but this particular car had seats made from a special kind of crocodile you’re very specifically not allowed to turn into a car headrest. Noteworthy, however, according to the Financial Express, these modifications were made after the car was purchased from Rolls-Royce, who as a rule, do not offer such options making this one of the few requests the company will not comply with while crafting a bespoke vehicle. However, the fact the owner’s response to being told no was to immediately get an aftermarket dealer to install them anyway just goes to show that nothing is off limits when it comes to customising one of these cars if you’re rich enough. We’re just glad Hannibal Lector never had a taste for these vehicles…

Keeping with the seats even the thread used to stitch the leather is customisable and as with everything else, Rolls-Royce keeps a huge number of options on hand. Again though this is only a baseline and the thread can be whatever colour the customer wants to the point that Rolls-Royce once spent a year developing a new type of thread that was the exact same shade of candy apple red as a car’s exterior after a customer complained none of the default red options on offer looked red enough.

Moving onto panelling, this is also entirely customised to the buyer’s own tastes, though there are some caveats the company has to make for the sake of safety. For example there’s an oft repeated story about the company taking a tree on a customer’s property that was struck by lightning and incorporating that into stuff like the dashboard. This is true, though the process to do so was more of a pain in the butt than you’d expect because the company had to perform things like stress and impact tests on the parts they constructed from the wood to ensure it adhered to industry-wide safety standards. Tests that were difficult to ensure were done properly with the finite amount of material the company had available. Difficult, but not impossible with the company eventually being able to do exactly as the customer asked and fold wood from their beloved tree into the car’s interior.

One of the more notable things sported by high-end Rolls-Royces is what’s called the Starlight Headliner, essentially a constellation of glittering stars woven into the car roof interior. In reality these “stars” are created by a series of fiber optic lights painstakingly woven into the interior and powered by over 2km of cables discreetly hidden away in the car’s bodywork. This constellation is, you guessed it, entirely bespoke and can be reflective of the night sky from any place and time on Earth. Just tell the team where and when you want the stars to be from and Rolls-Royce will confirm with an observatory what the stars looked like from the exact spot at the time and weave a facsimile of it into the roof of the interior so that every time you look up, it’s as if you’re looking at the night sky from that time and place. Other options for roof interiors include bespoke embroidery and even artwork, with the company, on at least one occasion, finding a way to put a whole painting into the roof of someone’s car.

To ensure customers can enjoy this luxury in peace without having to hear the ramblings of the plebians on the street, Rolls-Royce cars are crammed full of a pretty extreme amount of sound proofing with the company going out of its way to eliminate every possible source of noise from the obvious stuff like the engine to less obvious things you might not notice but still cause some noise like the squeak of the windshield wiper as it slaps aside water that dare touch the car.

Amusingly the company had to re-engineer their cars after it emerged they were soundproofing the cars too well.

You see, when Rolls-Royce began selling the appropriately named Ghost they were soon inundated with complaints from customers that found the near totally silent ride incredibly off-putting. With the car being so quiet that something as simple as a person adjusting their weight on the seat would sound super noisy in the eerie silence of the interior. To address this engineers removed some soundproofing and worked with acoustic engineers to ensure that the sounds the car did happen to make would harmonize together into a persistent “soft whisper”.

The end result is a car ride so smooth and quiet that Rolls-Royce has admitted that at least one wealthy patron from Asia had an entire bed fitted into the back of their car as it quickly became the one place they could relax and be fairly sure nothing short of a bomb going off would wake them up.

Speaking of which Rolls-Royce can of course be customised to sport defensive options like armour plating, though our queries about whether or not they can add machineguns like that one Aston Martin James Bond drives went unanswered for some reason.
Moving on from there, one of the final things the company does to make sure the car is totally watertight is submit it to monsoon-like conditions by spraying it with several dozen high-pressure jets for several minutes straight at all angles. After this, an engineer armed with an endoscope, you know the thing doctors use to check up your butt for possible medical issues, gives the car a once over. If a single drop of water is found somewhere it shouldn’t be, the entire car will be scrapped and the process of building it will begin again. At least according to company press releases, which we imagine are at least a little embellished for marketing reasons. Afterall, one would presume just fixing the issue that caused the drop to get in would be a bit more economical and faster than making the customer wait for an entirely new build…

But in any event, whilst a car is being built for a customer other options the customer can decide upon include whether or not the final product will sport the brand’s iconic Spirit of Ecstasy hood adornment or a more simple badge. This can again be customised, to an extent, with gold or jewel encrusted options being popular and a rumour that at least one was custom made to make it look as though the Spirit was dunking a basketball for a client who played the sport.

Last, but not least, a customer can customise themselves an umbrella which, as standard, is hidden away inside the door of most stock Rolls-Royce models. It is a British brand after all. As with everything else, customers can remove this option if they wish and have the cavity filled or altered to dispense Pringles or something.

Now, all of this sounds ridiculous but so far we’ve only talked about the base options Rolls-Royce offers because there’s a level beyond even this only offered to those with truly obscene amounts of money. Called Coachbuild, this ultra-exclusive bespoke service literally cannot be bought, with Rolls-Royce only offering it to clients they deem worthy of the absolute highest level of service they offer.

Described by the brand as the “most exclusive division of Bespoke” and the “automotive equivalent of haute couture”, the options afforded to anyone qualifying for this service are truly unlimited with the collaboration between client and brand beginning, to paraphrase Rolls-Royce, from the first line drawn on a sketchpad by one of their “artisans”.
Cars made by this arm of the company can take literal years to produce and each is a bonafide work of automotive art that is, as Rolls-Royce themselves boast -“A truly singular creation.”

Owing to the highly secretive nature of the clients such a service would naturally serve, details not filtered through the company themselves about Coachbuild cars are hard to come by but they very often describe one-of-a-kind details and embellishments. For instance the car we mentioned earlier with the specially-made paint that reflected the sun the same way as an optical phenomenon? That was one of these cars.

Other known Coachbuild cars incorporate similarly outlandish and unique colour-schemes, like the Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail, a car directly inspired by a single item, the Black Baccara rose. A flower said to be adored by the unnamed matriarch of the family which commissioned the car, which for the curious, took in excess of four years to make.
Which is admittedly impressive, but at the end of the day, it is just a car- a means to get from point A to point B comfortably. A car that likely cost more than most people’s homes and in some cases more than entire blocks of homes. Something the editor of this script, Daven’s, 1987 Toyota Tercel has been doing for him since all the way back in 1995 and still going strong with that sweet, sweet old car smell mixed with mild oil fumes from the exhaust, and a ceiling panel that may not have stars, but does definitely constitute a ceiling panel… despite having long since lost its needless covering fabric. And gas mileage? Please. The average Rolls-Royce absolutely cannot compete at nearly half of the perfection of that sky blue, two door Tercel. Your move Roycey.

The post Billionaire Build a Car- The Car Brand Where Every One is Literally One of a Kind appeared first on Today I Found Out.

For those who didn’t grow up in the late 20th century, it may seem strange to learn that for a time many people genuinely believed things like that humans randomly burst into flames for no apparent reason, with the occasional speculative news report or Unsolved Mysteries episode highlighting the latest instance, as well as that there was an area dubbed the Bermuda Triangle where almost certainly aliens were snapping up ships and planes for, we can only assume, maximal probage. This all brings us to the topic of today- how did the idea of the Bermuda Triangle first become ingrained in public consciousness, and was there ever actually any evidence of weird things happening there, or is it just yet another instance of the truism that humans will believe anything if a human in a suit says it on TV or it’s otherwise published in book form?

To begin with, let’s start with what exactly constitutes the Bermuda Triangle. While there is some disagreement among Bermuda Triangle truthers, the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle are the area formed if you drew direct lines on an oceanic map between the ports of Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico where allegedly a lot of weird stuff happens.

What kind of weird stuff? Well, legend holds that ships and planes passing through the Triangle occasionally just up and disappear like your dad when he went out for milk that one time.

Now, the skeptics among you may hear that and think, “Well, the ocean is pretty big and a generally dangerous place to exist, especially back before GPS and awesome satellite weather, so maybe a handful of the planes and ship traffic in that region just sank or something? I mean, it is a super high trafficked part of the ocean.”

Now, this is a very reasonable explanation.

But hear us out- what about if instead it was actually aliens?

This level of reasoning is essentially how the idea of the Bermuda Triangle took hold.

More specifically, the first to speculate towards this very reasonable and in all ways rational idea can be traced to an article written in 1964, titled, appropriately enough, The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.

This article was written for Argosy magazine by a man named Vincent H. Gaddis. A guy who basically spent his entire journalistic career applying the question “Okay, but what if an alien did it?” to everything.

Only slightly hyperbole, we should also point out that Gaddis penned other such essays as “New Evidence for Atlantis” and “Career of a Cursed Car”.

He also, funny enough, was one of the early pushers of the idea of humans spontaneously combusting.

On that note, for anyone who’s read some of Gaddis’s many pieces, as we, unfortunately, just had to do for work, it is clear that Gaddis was, in fact, in desperate need of a laxative, owing to being full of crap.

But as for his Bermuda Triangle piece, he notes that the Bermuda Triangle was already an observable phenomenon known to the sea-faring world, but that the air and sea captains of earth were hiding it from us landlubbers.

We can only presume because it’s not a good conspiracy theory if we don’t include potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people needing to be involved to make it check out.

Helpfully in his piece, he defines the area well and, despite his saying it was an existing well known thing, gives us the first known instance of both the idea and the name “Bermuda Triangle”. He states,

“Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this area, known as the “Bermuda Triangle,” most of the total vanishments have occurred.”

Defying all expectation, the article does go on to contain some factual elements, notably details concerning a number of ship and plane disappearances that occurred within the confines of the Triangle, some of which are genuinely fascinating. For example, Gaddis recounts the story of Flight 19, one of the most enduring mysteries in aviation history. Or, at least, that’s what a lot of people say. In fact, when you look at the details, there’s really no mystery at all here.

To sum up the tragedy of Flight 19 as quick as we can before we get back to the Bermuda Triangle- on Dec 5th, 1945, five American bombers, collectively given the designation Flight 19, were tasked with a training bombing exercise.

After bombs released, flight leader Lt. Charles Taylor had a problem. He radioed, “Both my compasses are out and I’m trying to find Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.”

We’re going to go ahead and give Taylor the benefit of the doubt that he was, in fact, being honest about his compasses, and it all wasn’t just an elaborate ruse to avoid having to go to Florida, as any sensible human would try for because, Florida.

But as you might imagine, without working compasses, at the time navigation over the ocean can be somewhat difficult, though not impossible if one knows where you started and can see the sun, which the flight could. And, of course, there were all the other planes in the flight that did have working compasses.

For whatever reasons, Taylor simply refused to listen to any of them or anyone on the ground or boats in the water who tried to help him, and was convinced he knew where they were. Such that when one of his students radioed to him “Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home; head west, dammit,” he seemingly denied the request.

On that note, Port Everglades Air Sea Rescue Unit 7 crew heard further exchanges between the pilots, with some of the students arguing with Taylor about their position, including discussing their own compass readings, but Taylor continued to go with what he thought was right, and the students continued to follow, despite disagreeing with him and that catastrophic disaster was sure to follow if Taylor was wrong.

At the time, Taylor was convinced heading west would lead to disaster because he thought that would just take them over the Gulf of Mexico.

That said, they did, for a time, do the sensible thing and split the difference and fly northwest, but Taylor eventually second guessed himself, radioing, “We didn’t fly far enough east; we may as well just turn around and fly east again.”

A bold move when you know North America is definitely to the west somewhere and the Atlantic definitely to the east.

Why none of his students simply noped out of his increasingly illogical instructions, it’s generally just chalked up to he was the instructor and in the position of authority, and they probably felt they had to follow orders like good soldiers.

Whatever the case there, it turns out Taylor had a bit of a history of losing his bearings, including two recent previous instances of needing to ditch into the sea when just such a thing happened. One instance occurred on June 14, 1944, and another around 7 months later on January 30, 1945, all leading up to this Flight 19 instance about 11 months after that finally doomed not only himself, but the entire Flight of planes.

In the end, as night descended and winds and stormier weather over the Atlantic picked up, Taylor’s last message of “All planes close up tight … we’ll have to ditch unless landfall … when the first plane drops below 10 gallons [38 liters], we all go down together.” clearly indicates aliens were involved in the disappearance and not simple faulty navigation and a flight leader in desperate need of Crew Resource Management training.

This is a concept that didn’t really become a defacto thing until decades later to avoid precisely the issue this Flight exhibited in spades- where the pilot in command or flight leader is clearly making mistakes, but those beneath them either don’t speak up when they see it because they are of lower position in authority, or the PIC simply refuses to listen to outside input from subordinates when given, sometimes leading to catastrophic results, as happened with Flight 19.

In the end, shortly before their complete disappearance, the flight’s position was triangulated based on their radio broadcasts to be far out to sea north east of the Bahamas. Had they simply headed west, as some among Taylor’s flight suggested, they’d have been fine. Other than, you know, now finding themselves having to exist in Florida.

Instead, Flight 19 was never seen or heard from again. To date there has never been any wreckage found and a massive, multi-day search and rescue operation utilising the combined might and resources of the Navy and Coast Guard in the days that followed didn’t find so much as a shred of evidence that the planes touched down anywhere in the roughly 250,000 square miles of ocean they searched.

Going back to while the planes were still in the air, the tower at Fort Lauderdale, upon it becoming clear that the Taylor and co were lost, began putting together a search and rescue. Part of this included diverting two PBM Mariner flying boats taking part in training exercises nearby with the 13 man crew of each plane being updated in real-time on the estimated location of Flight 19.

Adding to conspiracy theorist fodder, one of these rescue planes also disappeared, and unlike the crew of Flight 19, without any evidence anything was amiss, with the last transmissions recorded from this crew being a routine acknowledgement of its updated mission parameters before it also inexplicably disappeared.

In all, 27 souls were lost that day. The 14 man crew of Flight 19 and the 13 rescuers sent to find them.

Getting back to Gaddis, to his credit his recollection of the events that day in his article are fairly accurate, though he makes a few notable and telling omissions in his retelling. For example, Gaddis makes note of an “explosion” that was seen in the sky around 7:30 in the evening. A detail that does appear in official reports. With the observation being credited to the crew of the merchant vessel, the S.S. Gaines Mills.

However, in his article, Gaddis writes this off as a coincidence, claiming that the explosion happened several hours after Flight 19 made its final radio transmission, ultimately concluding that the explosion the crew of the Gaines Mills saw was probably “an exploding meteor”.

In truth, the explosion occurred in the exact area Navy radar teams lost contact with the rescue craft. In addition, the Captain of the Gaines Mills, Shonna Stanley, would specifically note in his message to the Fort Lauderdale tower that he and his crew sailed through both wreckage and burning gasoline in an ultimately fruitless search for potential survivors, to quote the message, in part –

“At 1950, observed a burst of flames, apparently an explosion, leaping flames 100 feet high and burning for ten minutes …Stopped, circled area using searchlights, looking for survivors. None found.”

A detail Gaddis failed to mention for some reason.

Gaddis also failed to mention that the Navy search team took samples of the water around where the Gaines Mills searched and this water developed, to quote “an oily film”. Sadly a literal more in-depth search couldn’t be conducted due to the roughness of the seas at the time, but this detail combined with the fact that the Gaines Mills reports of a large fireball in the sky were corroborated by other vessels in the area led to the Navy concluding that the PBM-5 taking part in the search had simply exploded in mid-air.

Clearly Aliens… Or perhaps that the PBM was well known for being unsafe and at risk of such a catastrophic failure. You see, the flying gas tank, as the plane was also sometimes called, held almost 10 tons of gas, with flexible fuel lines having an annoying tendency to come loose and leak, especially in heavy turbulence conditions. While leaking fuel isn’t necessarily a catastrophic issue, in some rare cases it can be beyond the obvious problem of running out of fuel.

In this case, it is assumed that a fuel line came loose, ultimately caused a fire and, as any pilot knows, if you have a fire in an airplane, you’re going to have a bad time. Which is why in the general case if one occurs, the rule of the day is to throw everything else to the wind and while someone aboard is attempting to get the fire out if they can, the pilot in command is to get the plane on the ground as fast as safely possible without ripping off the wings. In this case, they seemingly had no such major warning, with fuel leaking, igniting, and the entire near fully fueled plane going up in a fireball.

As for Flight 19 itself, officially the cause of the disappearance today is listed as “Cause unknown”, though initial findings placed the blame squarely on Lt. Taylor, noting that he was “guilty of mental aberration”. Read, he got lost, panicked, and refused to listen to anyone on the ground or any of his subordinates in Flight 19 with regards to their position. He simply knew better, explicitly basing his positional thoughts on some islands he had spotted he was convinced were part of the Florida Keys.

Of note here, directly before this exercise, Taylor had been based out of Miami, and even during the flight at one point mistakenly identified himself as MT-28, or Miami Torpedo Bomber, and presumably simply saw some islands that reminded him of part of the keys, even though that’s not at all where they were flying that day.

While all of this may seem monumentally stupid on Taylor’s part, and it was rationally, for anyone who’s ever watched any of the many awesome videos from the Air Safety Institute on various real world aviation accidents, you’ll see this sort of thing is shockingly common in aviation accidents. Something goes wrong. Pilot panics to some extent, and as a result generally starts making increasingly irrational decisions and increasing irrational radio calls, with ever escalating panic, not so much because of the initial problem per se, but more so as a result of the aftermath of panicking. Sometimes this irrationality is aided by hypoxia at high altitudes, but not strictly necessary. Panicking humans often do and say weird things regardless.

In contrast, as those Air Safety Institute documentaries often show, pilots who keep their heads, even in seemingly catastrophic conditions, have a remarkable tendency to get themselves on the ground safely despite it all.

As to why the official explanation of what happened here got changed to “Cause unknown,” this came as the result of a complaint filed by Taylor’s mother who didn’t appreciate her deceased son being blamed for the deaths of everyone on Flight 19, and someone among the military brass deciding to not rub salt in her open wound, changing the official cause of accident from blaming Taylor’s decision making in it all to “Cause Unknown.”

Back to Gaddis, his careful massaging of the facts of Flight 19 as well the details of other similar cases of plane and ship disappearances within the confines of Bermuda Triangle (which if you recall, he himself seems to have made up and defined) allowed him to spin the narrative of the area being a hotbed for mysterious, unexplainable phenomenon.

The problem is, it isn’t.

Like at all.

In the many decades since Gaddis wrote his piece, many studies have been done on the so-called Bermuda Triangle by everyone from insurance brokers to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and none have found any proof whatsoever that planes or ships are more likely to crash, sink or otherwise vanish without a trace when traveling within the commonly accepted boundaries of the Triangle than any other part of the ocean. Or to quote how the NOAA put it in a 2010 press release –

“There is no evidence that mysterious disappearances occur with any greater frequency in the Bermuda Triangle than in any other large, well-traveled area of the ocean.”

In essence- the ocean is unfathomably big and deep. Ships and planes are not. Finding one that has disappeared in its depths, even if you know exactly where it sank, is often an effort in futility.

For instance, consider the Titanic, the wreck of which took about seven decades of searching to find despite the area in which it sank being widely known and billions of dollars, if adjusted for inflation, being spent searching for it over that span.

As an aside, because this is wild, attempts to recover the wreck of the Titanic, or at least all of the stuff and people aboard, began almost immediately after it sank, with one company tasked by the families of those on board seriously considering dynamiting the area of the ocean in which the ship sank. The thinking being that the explosions would destroy the wreckage and launch all of the bodies out of the water like meaty missiles.

Back to the Bermuda Triangle, despite there being no evidence that the area is more dangerous than any other comparably trafficked section of ocean, Gaddis’ article captured the attention of the more conspiratorially minded, culminating in the publication of a book titled simply, The Bermuda Triangle.

Published in 1974 and written by a guy called Charles Berlitz, the book is noted as being the thing that really put the Bermuda Triangle on the map. With it covering and expanding on many of the same ship and plane disappearances noted by Gaddis in his original article a decade prior. Like Gaddis, Berlitz wasn’t exactly entirely accurate in his retelling of events and wasn’t above pulling stuff out of his circular, rather than triangular, sphincter when it suited his narrative.

This, in turn, led to the book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, published in 1975.

Largely written as a literary response to Berlitz’s book by sceptic and clear individual on the alien’s payroll, Lawrence (Larry) Kusche, the book examined hundreds of official reports to interrogate Berlitz’s claims and found that much of what he wrote was of quality similar to the leavings of horses.

Kusche found that not only did Berlitz misrepresent many facts – for instance noting that Navy brass were “baffled” by certain disappearances, when in reality they’d simply accepted the grim reality that sometimes planes and ships sink and that it is generally impossible to recover the bodies aboard or wreckage swallowed by the waves- but also Berlitz just made stuff up. Inventing, among other things, fictitious radio transmissions that never happened.

To quote Kusche summing on his findings –

“What isn’t misinterpreted by Berlitz is fabricated”

As an aside, Kusche also wrote a book about the disappearance of Flight 19 in 1980, which similarly poured over the official report of the incident by the Navy Board of Investigation and is today considered one of the most comprehensive overviews of the incident and pretty clearly illustrates what likely happened.

Kursche is definitely working for the Pentaverant you guys.

Following up on all this is Australian scientist, Karl Kruszelnicki, who has made metaphorical waves over the last few years with his groundbreaking conclusion that the ocean is really big and that finding missing ships and planes lost in it is akin to finding a needle in an ocean sized haystack. And that, to quote the results of his groundbreaking research, –

“The number [of ships and planes] that go missing in the Bermuda Triangle is the same as anywhere in the world on a percentage basis.”

Nevertheless because, humans, Berlitz’s book nonetheless ignited the imaginations of the public and other speculative fiction writers, with the latter in the aftermath generally regurgitating the work of Berlitz, occasionally adding their own spin to it, crediting the disappearances listed (many of which have logical, accepted explanations) to everything from aliens to a black hole.

Thus, while it is largely agreed that ships and planes don’t disappear within the confines of the Triangle more often than they do any other popular, commonly traversed area of the ocean and that the disappearances that do occur generally have reasonable explanations (bad weather, human error, sea-faring werewolves ect …) some have decided that it is totally actually aliens. Or mermen. Or ghosts. Or maybe even a rogue sea monster.

There’s of course no proof of this, but then again, there’s also no proof that it wasn’t aliens.

Checkmate scientists.

As for those who adhere to this aliens explanation, and why this specific part of the ocean over all the rest, some speculate the aliens use it as a sort of space-Walmart, picking up a ship or plane when they need parts or human beings to probe in various ways. Apparently the aliens haven’t heard of modern dating apps… I mean, many members of Grindr would probably even welcome the probing. No non-consensual abductions required.

For those who don’t buy that aliens are responsible, we also happened upon conspiracy theories positing that the Triangle contains a wormhole, with there being some disagreement about exactly where this wormhole leads. Some say to an earth-like alien planet billions of light years away, others an alternate dimension, and some the far off past or future. All we do know is that wherever the ships, planes and unfortunate people aboard go, it is a one-way trip, similar to the hypothesis that they actually find themselves at the bottom of the ocean.

On that note, then there are theories that posit that the Bermuda Triangle threat comes not from the sky, but below the waves. While a random, rogue sea monster or very angry and committed super-sized whale or shark is a popular hypothesis, our favourite we found is that the Bermuda Triangle is actually located directly above the fabled lost city of Atlantis and that its denizens randomly sink ships or shoot down planes for reasons.

This is actually one of the hypotheses Charles Berlitz proposed in a later book about Atlantis being totally super real you guys despite it very explicitly just being something Plato pulled out of his butt and everyone understood it as such, even his contemporaries- see our video What Did the Grees Really Say About Atlantis, but nevertheless Berlitz suggesting that the people of Atlantis used a special magic crystal to both shield themselves from view, and also attack passing ships and planes that get too close. From the air we guess.. And, you know, just some of them. Not all the thousands upon thousands of others traversing the region…

Also, because we can’t not mention this, at some point Berlitz claimed to have somehow obtained one of these crystals but then inexplicably lost it. Which is why he couldn’t show it to journalists when asked. He totally had one though. Wake up Sheeple!

Speaking of which, Berlitz even suggested in some of his writings that the people of Atlantis actually worked in tandem with aliens to hide their existence and that the super-advanced technology they used to hide themselves from view or summon hurricanes and ship-swalling whirlpools was based on gifts given to them by little green men that had visited the Earth eons ago.

We can only hypothesize to build Pyramids. I mean, the pyramids are triangular too. Just saying… The truth is out there.

But in all serious, we think the aforementioned Larry Kusche said it best when discussing these sorts of obviously false narratives that many cling to despite all evidence to the contrary, from Flat Earth to Bermuda Triangle to Moon Landing Conspiracy to so much related to politics-

“Actually, there is an issue of greater importance than whether “paranormal forces” are at work anywhere. In this age of information explosion and social media, it is worrisome that so many people believe so many things without requiring any supporting evidence, that they employ little skepticism, have such a lack of curiosity, and such a bias toward what they want to be true, that they ignore what is true… Once false information becomes “common knowledge,” no matter how thoroughly it might be shown to be false, the false version will continue to be believed by some, either because they remain uninformed about the correct information or because they refuse to accept any information that is contrary to the beliefs they hold… The need for skepticism, for paying close attention to detail, is of critical importance in everyday life… Skepticism and critical thinking are important in politics when voters let their emotions rule rather than becoming informed on the positions of the candidates. It is important in issues of health, such as the vaccination/autism controversy, which is resulting in diseases that were virtually wiped out to start coming back…”

In the end, it’s easy to mock Flat Earthers, Bermuda Triangle believers, the list goes on and on, but human brain human braining ensures that literally all of us believe some things that are just as easily disproven, or disbelieve some things that are easily proved true with even a modicum of actually looking into it. Yet so often no amount of evidence presented to us can shake us from our firm belief, and often such evidence presented to us has the opposite effect, such that, much like Flat Earthers, we’re soon willing to make bizarre logical leaps just to find a way to rationalize continuing to believe what we believed before, despite all evidence presented to us to the contrary.

And, worse, when that clear evidence contrary to what we believe comes from experts in a given field, it can drive us to simply distrust that source of information about anything, despite their expertise and our relative lack of it. Leading to a greater problem in that, at the end of the day, if we’re conditioned to distrust the literal experts in a given field, rather than the result being us better informed on some specific issue, we’re simply more easily misled by those who aren’t experts, particularly those who are especially good at spinning narratives that usually contain a modicum of truth to hook our brains, then loading a whole lot of crap on top that isn’t true at all, but furthers the individual’s agenda. Whether that be in politics, or simply selling more of their books as in the case of Bill Kaysing’s bizarre and ever changing ideas that kicked off the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theory, see our video on the subject for more on that, or the aforementioned Charles Berlitz with the Bermuda Triangle thing.

Cascading to global levels, leading many to simply distrust all experts in a given field, such as scientists of a given branch, and in the most extreme case even some believing that these individuals are all simply in on some mass cover up of the truth on a given issue, despite how nonsensical that is when talking countless thousands of experts the world over who would all have to be in on it.

No expert is right all the time. Everyone gets things wrong. Science itself is all about trying to figure out where what we currently believe true may be wrong and studying to move the state of knowledge to more and more accurate to reality, with any good scientist being the first to point out all the ways they’ve been wrong once it’s revealed, which, of course, all just adds fodder for those trying to discredit them. After all, if they were wrong about X, and admitting it no less, who’s to say they aren’t wrong about Y…

Well, the data can often answer that one way or the other on many things. But who’s got time to look into that?

And on top of all that, scientists themselves are also subject to such biases of thinking and beliefs, particularly with regards to things they learned in their schooling days and haven’t looked into since as they focussed on other areas of their field, complicating all of this.

But all that aside, on the whole, at any given time, by virtue of having become experts in some field, the experts are going to know what they’re talking about far better than the non-experts, from random internet commenters to arguably the worst of spreaders of misinformation in particularly vocal politicians on any side of the political spectrum. With usually the more extreme on one end of the political spectrum or other being the worst offenders of all, and the moderates, well, more moderate and balanced in the general case.
In all though, the whole Bermuda Triangle thing is really just a representation of how all our brains are wired taken to the extreme. And every human who has ever humaned into adulthood has exhibited similar thought processes about some given issue, despite the data clearly saying something else from what we believe.

Kursche sums up what we need to try to battle this innate tendency- “Skepticism. Critical thinking. Honesty,” including with ourselves about what we believe, why we believe it, and whether we or our sources of information really actually know anything about a given thing or not.

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